Burberry's London flagship store recently underwent a renovation that turned the 192-year old building into a digitally integrated showroom for the luxury fashion brand.

Last weekend, American Public Media's radio show, Marketplace Money, aired a feature about how some luxury brands are starting to hurt in the long-suffering economy even as inexpensive brands are thriving. One of the companies that saw a slide in earnings was Burberry.

Perhaps coincidentally, the company best known for its plaids and classic trenches wants to boost its status through digital interactivity. This week, after two years of renovation, the brand open the doors of its digitally integrated store, Burberry Regent Street, in London.

Burberry executives say they're "blurring" the line between the physical and digital, mimicking the online shopping experience in Burberry Regent Street. Many features on the site have a physical counterpart, from the live customer-service chats to interactive outfit suggestions.

Interactive signage greets shoppers as they walk in and displays key points in the building. Associates carry iPads with customer information, including past purchases and preferences. On the floor, certain articles of clothing and accessories carry RFID chips. These chips interact with store mirrors to show videos on craftsmanship or examples of what the items can be paired with. 

At the end of the shopping trip, customers can check out through a mobile system a la an Apple Store, or go to a regular cashier. 

Occasionally taking center stage in the store, quite literally, are "disruptive digital takeovers." At set times, thunder claps from all 500 store speakers, and on all 100 mirrors/screens, including those in fitting rooms, appears an iconic London downpour. (If you're a skittish shopper, may we suggest calling ahead to make sure you avoid these displays?) The rest of the time, models are shown walking from screen to screen, promoting the company's most recent line.

And, just in case you were wondering, the store does have WiFi.

Minecraft changed the video game industry by selling millions of downloads of an indie game. Now the free-form building game is inviting players to help redesign real-world locations around the world.

Minecraft creator Mojang announced yesterday in a blog post that it is teaming up with United Nations Habitat to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016.  

The project, called Block by Block, enlists local youth to improve their neighborhoods. Block by Block is the international version of a previous Mojang project known as My Blocks (Mina Kvarter in Swedish), organized in conjunction with Swedish Building Services. Mojang managing director Carl Manneh wrote:

“It has proven to be a great way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having architectural training. The ideas presented by the citizens lay as a ground for political decisions. Mina Kvarter has been a great success and it’s spreading into more areas in Sweden. It has also been recognized internationally as a new way to do urban development planning. Recently, the UN found out about what we are doing and we got together to talk.”

The first Block by Block site, in Nairobi, Kenya, is “already in the planning phase.” Urban planners interested in following the project will have to wait for status updates, as Mojang is still building the Block by Block website.

Welcome to the new Internet! Last night, some 200 major service providers, including AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Google, Facebook and Time Warner Cable, switched over to a new version of the Internet protocol. The transition from Internet Protocol v4 to v6 (skipping over the number in between) is the biggest infrastructure shift in the Internet since the network was founded. Yet Internet Society officials, prior to the switch last night, calmly assured users that they wouldn't notice a thing. To understand why, it's necessary to delve into the tortured history of IPv6.

Proposed in 1995 and adopted as a workable protocol in 1999, Internet Protocol version 6 was designed to support the Interent's rampant growth. It promised to boost the number of Internet addresses from 4.3 billion to 340 trillion trillion trillion. It also offered tighter security through packet-level encryption and stepped-up authentication, along with the ability for routers to better manage traffic flow through such features as packet labeling. The header format would be improved, enabling traffic management features such as "fast lanes," or fatter channels for bigger content.

But the new protocol faced serious headwinds. In 2005, the revised network address system became the object of a security scare. A year later, it had become the target of political scorn in Congress as "net neutrality" became the buzzword of the day and the fast-lane capability was publicly condemned by one congressman as "a system of informational apartheid."

With IPv6 stymied, IPv4 adopted many of the same features over time. "The reality of the network world went from being primarily research to being driven by business interests," Leslie Daigle, Internet Society CITO, told ReadWriteWeb. "IPv4 was able to replicate many of the same features, one way or another. So the difference in opportunity wasn't quite so clear."

Frustrated by the lack of progress, in 2006 Internet architects suggested a change of tactic. A document for that year's IPv6 Forum in South Korea (PDF available here) observed that the protocol's features had failed to resonate with big business. "Both business and government leaders are concerned about how problems are resolved, how revenue is generated, or how to build efficiencies and cost savings into their organization," the document said. "IPv6 certainly has the ability to help deliver these scenarios, but the focus of the story needs to be the solution – not the technology that helped deliver that solution."

But that didn't work either.

Today, private businesses without a stake in the Internet's core infrastructure have yet to budge to any significant degree, and consumer-grade router manufacturers and firewall software makers continue to depend upon IPv4 (even as they make IPv6 available as an option). In fact, the lack of attention being paid to securing networks that actually do transition to IPv6 has become its own security hole - one which security-product makers are now touting as a potential incursion watershed.

The Un-Transition

Internet Society senior public policy manager Sally Shipman Wentworth, who helped manage the VHF-to-HDTV transition for the White House, all but admitted defeat. She told ReadWriteWeb that IPv4 will likely always exist on the Internet in some form, and that the move to IPv6 should not be framed as a transition per se.

"All the people working on IPv6 were probably somewhat distressed to see this happen, but many of the things we developed for IPv6 got back-boarded to IPv4," said Robert Hinden, the man considered by many to be the "Father of IPv6." Presently, he's a fellow at security-product maker Check Point Software, and a member of the Internet Society's Board of Directors.  "The only one that can't - which is why we're having this discussion today - is... getting a larger address space in the Internet. That's the reason it was designed. That's the reason it's getting deployed."

"In practice, what's going to happen is, v4 will exist on 'private land,' and more of the public Internet will become IPv6," says the Internet Society's Daigle. "That's why June 6, 2012 is such an important date. It's the beginning of when IPv6 becomes the new normal, and we'll let v4 fall away."

Net Gain

So what improvements can Internet users expect from the changeover? Not much, Daigle says - at least not in the short run.

Improvements will show up during the next two years. By then, users who have v6 access should be able to compare their service to those stuck with v4. They should find measurable differences, she says, "not because either technology is inherently faster, but because what networks are going to have to do to cope with a lack of v4 addresses... are going to cause problems with connectivity. Yes, you will see positive differences between the v6 network and v4, in a few years. What I don't think is necessary, at least at this time, is for people to consciously turn on v6."

She speaks of having seen independent assessments from universities forecasting as much as 50% IPv6 traffic soon after June 6. That won't be because students turn on IPv6 in droves, she explains, but rather the nature of Internet traffic flow among colleges, whose networks should be among the first to be IPv6-ready.

In the long run, though, all those new addresses created by IPv6 will allow the Internet to keep growing. The network will expand to encompass every smartphone and tablet on Earth, then cars, eyeglasses, cameras, electrical meters, and on and on, without degrading service. You won't notice the difference — and you'll be glad you don't.

Google, Yahoo and Facebook are among the leaders in the growing charge to adopt the critically needed Internet addressing system known as IPv6, which is generally reagarded as the only viable solution for the stagnation of the Internet.

World IPv6 Launch 2012 brings together “major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers and Web companies around the world… to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services,” starting today.

Here’s why, by the numbers:

In 1973, when Vint Cerf and his team put together the networking rules for what would become the Internet, they used an addressing system with 32 bits of addressing space - the well-known 192.X.X.X IPv4 system in use today. This gave the fledgling Internet the capacity for 4.3 billion individual addresses; far more than Cerf and his team could even conceive of needing back then.

Severely Mis-Underestimated

Obviously, Cerf and everyone else severely underestimated the growth of the Internet and all the various ways it would be used. More than just a system to share files and images, the Internet has become a platform for commerce and communication that eventually dwarfed the telephone network, the only comparable network on the planet.

That growth has led us to the problem we have today. According to Cerf - who took part in a Google Hangout on Tuesday afternoon, there are currently 5.5 billion mobile devices in the world. If each one of them were to need an IP address (and that’s likely to be true in the very near future), they alone would require more than the available Internet addresses under IPv4. New devices simply would not be able to connect.

Fortunately Cerf and others saw this bottleneck coming. In 1996, they put together a new addressing protocol, IPv6, with 128 bits of address space. That means IPv6 can accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. That should be enough for a while.

But the transition to IPv6 has been slow, as many organizations hesitate to make the needed efforts. Comcast IPv6 architect John Jason Brzozowski estimated that Comcast is seeing about 5% of users able to support IPv6 right now, though that number is steadily rising.

Today’s public moves by major websites including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with ISPs such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable, to completely switch to always-on IPv6 operations represents the first big addition of IPv6 connectivity since the protocol was launched in 1996. Joined by networking vendors such as Akamai and Cisco, this year’s efforts will begin to implement IPv6 broadly while keeping IPv4 connectivity on in parallel. Internet users, regardless of their connectivity status, should not notice any changes to the way they venture around the Internet.

Why Bother?

Given that so few are even trying IPv6,  why is it so important to adopt it?

In addition to making it possible for more devices to connect directly to the Net, faster and more granular connectivity could be another major benefit. IPv6 is not inherently faster, but because of the increasing shortage of device addresses, right now many devices have to aim their connectivity to other devices through the cloud, according to Cisco fellow Mark Townsley.

As IPv6 becomes more widely adopted, Townsley explained, individual devices will be more able to directly connect to each other, without having to depend on the cloud as intermediary.

Looking forward a bit further, widely heralded hardware-based networks, often called the “Internet of Things,” depend on IPv6 to make room for new connected devices.

Forget 5.5 billion mobile devices. Imagine the possibility of billions, even trillions of pieces of hardware connected to the Internet, all sending out signals as simple as “this pen is out of ink” or as important as “someone is having a stroke that they don’t feel yet.”

Vendors are already lining up to create devices that leverage this capability. For example, more than 50% of devices at CES were Internet connected. Some hardware vendors, like Cosm (formerly Pachube) live in that space right now - helping device-makers create products that communicate efficiently and reliably on an increasingly crowded Internet. Because of its very mission, of course, Cosm has been IPv6-ready for quite some time.

Traffic Jams Ahead?

The picture is not all roses and sunshine: With the increase of devices will come an accompanying rise in traffic. Looking at the kind of data generated by the Internet of Things, many devices send small packets of data that shouldn’t overwhelm data networks. But as smarter devices handle larger pieces of unstructured data - and video streams - network saturation could become a very real problem.

Fortunately, we won’t have to deal with it all at once. In the Google Hangout, Cerf emphasized that the introduction of IPv6 is not so much a switch, but a transparent adoption of IPv6 connectivity as time goes on. And Google IPv6 engineers Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline added that since many networking devices are starting to be sold with built-in IPv6 and IPv4 features, the change to IPv6 is often technically not very challenging.

At Google, Colitti explained, “the problem is very wide, but not very deep.” Meaning that while he and Kline would have to find any software or device within Google that depended on IP addressing, actually flipping the switch once the code or device was identified is relatively simple. Both engineers expect that other organizations will have similar experiences.

The good news is that IPv6 is in place now and will be ready for organizations to use as they move to it. There’s no Y2K deadline of doom hanging over our heads. But companies looking to establish deeper connectivity with customers - and especially those planning to connect large numbers of mobile devices and IP hardware and applications - should consider beginning a gradual transition to the new addressing protocol.

Or you could simply wait until you find your percentage of IPv6 traffic. The nice thing to remember is this: Virtually all networking software and devices will be able to handle both protocols for some time to come.

For more information on IPv6, download the free ReadWriteWeb brief: How to Prepare for IPv6 Networking.

PLM is like PDM on steroids, extending the concept to cover "the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal," as Wikipedia puts it. If you haven't heard of PLM, don't feel bad. The category hasn't exactly set the world on fire. But Autodesk thinks cloud computing can change all that.

At yesterday's Autodesk Media Summit in San Francisco, the awesomely named Robert "Buzz" Kross, senior VP of design, lifecycle and simulation, acknowledged that "PLM does not have a great history." The 10-year-old market, he acknowledged, "is still fundamentally immature." But he claimed that Autodesk PLM 360, which launched late last month, leverages the cloud to finally help PLM fulfill its promise to the enterprise.

I'm no engineer, and maybe that's why the pitch impressed me. Kross said PLM 360 is specifically designed to go beyond PDM's engineering focus and bring together all aspects of a product lifecycle, including supply chains, quality management, facilities and so on - and on all platforms. Kross added that it works with existing enterprise business models and practices, and installations take days, not months. And unlike traditional PLM, he said, the cloud makes it relatively simple to set up trial installations.

But as is often the case, the cloud's biggest impact comes in rewriting the cost-benefit equation. According to Kross, a typical PLM installation can approach $5 million in the first year. PLM 360 clocks in under $300,000. Even if the product can't match traditional functionality, cutting costs by an order of magnitude can open up the category to many more potential customers and use cases.

PLM may never be sexy, but as with other business applications from CRM to ERP, moving to the cloud can help make it dramatically easier and more affordable. I can't judge how PLM 360 compares with traditional PLM solutions from vendors like Siemens PLM, Oracle, Dassault Systèmes, SAP and others. But assuming Kross' price comparison is valid, even "good enough" and much cheaper can be a game changer.

Most people think of Autodesk as the maker of AutoCAD, the design software of choice for architects, engineers and other design professionals - typically running on high-powered workstations. So why is Autodesk CEO Carl Bass so hung up on the "democratization" of technology - spreading technology to the cloud computing platforms and mobile devices?

At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

Bass sees the world changing from a PC-centric model where workers promise to "email you that file when I get back to the office," to an environment where mobile devices and the cloud make where ever you are the computing center of the world.

It's already happening, he claimed, citing a list of impressive usage figures:

• 2 million unique visitors a month to Autodesk 360, the company's cloud offering


• 30 files a minute uploaded to AutoCAD WS, the company's cloud-based AutoCAD editor


• 10 million downloads of SketchBook in 2 years, now averaging 150,000 per week on PC and mobile platforms


• 13 million unique visitors - more than Pinterest - to the company's Instructables community


• 21 million unique visitors a month to Pixlr, its online photo editor

On the low end, naysayers like to denigrate the importance of mobile products, Bass said, calling them "juvenile" "toys." But he pointed out that "consumers by night are often professionals by day."

He also claimed that professionals can do serious work on today's portable devices. "I think we're underestimating these small devices... in the work that we do. They can run serious apps" for engineers and other demanding users, and they are getting more powerful all the time.

Meanwhile, on the high end, the cloud lets anyone take advantage of analyses that used to require dedicating expensive workstations for days at a time. Now, "You can do it in the cloud in an hour," he said.

The cloud, Bass added, "is an infinitely scalable resource," limited only by how much you're willing to pay. For urgent jobs, you can pay more and get it done faster. Other tasks can be done more cheaply over time. And that raises a fundamental question: "What would you do differently if you could compute answers faster?"

Autodesk may be a bit ahead of its time. The vast majority of serious design work is still being done sitting at powerful workstations, just as it has been for a while. But Bass couldn't be more correct about the trends. It's hard to argue that more and more computing tasks are going to stop moving away from the desktop. Big, data intensive jobs will move to the cloud while smaller, more UI-focused tasks are going mobile.

There will always be some things best done sitting at your computer. But the number of those things is clearly shrinking, not growing.

Tomorrow, I'll write about Autodesk's cloud-based PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) offering. But in the meantime, enjoy a couple more shots of some of the cool designs on display in the Autodesk Gallery:

After Sept. 11, 2001, the new DHS department was ordered to carry out Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) - an order mandating a smarter card that contains its own biometrics, effectively invalidating the card if someone else happens to be holding it. It's a decade later, and agencies throughout the government are moving to cloud architectures. Now DHS is taking step 2 in the rollout of a defense identity management system (DEFIMNET) forged through trials with DOD. The challenge, as the CEO of the manufacturer of this system tells ReadWriteWeb, will be to live up to HSPD-12 expectations that were written before the cloud as we know it today was even conceived.

Swipe This

"We are providing a system that allows a government worker or contractor to access data outside the fortress, for lack of a better term," states Route1 CEO Tony Busseri in an interview with RWW. Painting a picture of something looking quite the opposite of a cloud, Busseri describes a system that incorporates Route1's MobiKEY Fusion device, which enables access to this fortress from remote devices by way of a smarter personal identity verification (PIV) card.

"We often get lulled into a comfort level in today's marketplace where, if you put the right password into the right computer or tablet with the right software on it, that means we're doing a good job of authenticating the individual. It doesn't. What it means is that you've authenticated an asset." Meaning, there's no guarantee that the thing that delivered the password is a person as opposed to a resource acting on the person's behalf. The latter may be a convenience for some private enterprises. But it fails to meet the specifications of HSPD-12.

Contrary to some of the designs and aspirations of cloud architectures, sensitive government data should never extend outside the fortress boundaries depicted in the diagram above, asserts Busseri. "Specifically, data should not go outside these entities' firewalls. Too often in today's world, we believe that to support teleworking or mobile computing, data has to go with you on the device that goes outside the network. We're bombarded by messages from folks that deliver an Android or iOS-based operating system - everyone talks about how as data gets bigger, it's going to create a better experience for the worker. We fundamentally believe that the greatest security risk is when data goes outside the firewall. The administrator, or whoever you want to identify as the lead, no longer has eyeballs on that information. There's no way of ensuring it will ever properly, completely come back inside the network."

The Argument for Keeping the Fortress From the Cloud

One argument we've heard from cloud and virtualization solution providers is that secure, remote access through virtual sessions enables workers to fully access resources from within what Route1's Busseri calls the "fortress," without actually having to move data outside that fortress and copy it to local storage on remote devices. Done properly, they say, remote virtual access can be at least as secure as on-premise access, if not more so.

Busseri disagrees. "There's no way data should be going up into a cloud, from my perspective. It should be staying behind the firewalls, within the fortress, within the network," he remarks. Although his company's principal clients are government agencies, Busseri is on the record as against language in the Senate's 2011 cybersecurity bill that would grant a federal authority the right to take control of private systems housing government data, such as cloud service providers, in the event of a national cyber-emergency. If the system is designed properly, he says, the fortress need not extend its boundaries when times get tough.

"We make a big leap of faith to say that, in a moment of crisis as defined by our politicians and our leaders, they can take control of our systems. It assumes that those who are in control actually have great security. If that [plan] were implemented today, it would be a mess... If we allowed them to take control of networks and information and data, it would likely become even more vulnerable as a result of that control. So until the federal government gets as secure as it can be today, I don't know why we would ever implement this."

Well, if you've been following along with the SOA story, you know that cloud computing platforms have catapulted the service concept onto a huge and growing platform. Now, the consortium - led by software giants IBM, Oracle, and SAP, along with HP, and business consultancy CapGemini - has produced a formal interpretation of the role services play in the cloud, by offering a new term for the concept. Say it with me (if you can): XaaS.

If a component delivers a service over a network using a service-oriented infrastructure, the Open Group now explains, in whatever form that takes, the concept will be referred to as XaaS. Literally, the X stands for... anything.

"This is the essence of cloud computing," reads the Open Group's new Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure (SOCCI) framework. "It refers to an increasing number of services that are delivered over a network. Anything as a service requires an understanding of the service objectives and the accounting of service use and quality. The objectives, use, and quality can be determined from the underlying reference model for SOI: Broad network access (cloud) + resource pooling (cloud) + business-driven infrastructure on-demand (SOI) + service-orientation (SOI) = XaaS."

SOCCI is a necessary adaptation to the OG's existing SOI concept, mainly because certain aspects of cloud services had become incongruous with the formal framework for SOI even up until last week. The expectation for SOI was built around software contained within the fixed space of server hardware (note: no virtualization) in an enterprise data center, or perhaps (begrudgingly) through cohosting services. Resources were provisioned directly and manually by administrators, and financing was often expected to be handled as capital expenditures.

The new SOCCI framework embraces the modern understanding of cloud services as spelled out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. There are three principal divisions - SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS - and usually anything else that vendors may attach to an "-aaS" is arbitrary and often self-serving. Open Group leaves the door open for something else to fit there later, but makes clear that these three pillars are the only ones that need to hold up the cloud for now.

Previously, the SOI framework helped organizations to understand how to design, using architecture, the hardware foundations for their services. With cloud computing, much of that architectural process is rendered moot. You provision the basic characteristics of the virtual systems you need to deliver services. And if they don't work well or properly, you change those characteristics. SOCCI has adopted this concept now, and is advancing it up until the time it needs to be completely redefined all over again.

Quoting from the newly revised framework:

Cloud computing puts new demands on the IT infrastructure and management thereof. It requires an abstract approach to the operational environment. A cloud computing provider cannot any longer tailor its environment for each subscriber. It means that instead of a physical device, cloud computing offers an abstraction of a server, file system, storage, network, database, etc. Moreover, increasing providers' profitability and maximizing the utilization of resources requires multi-tenancy, dynamic allocation of resources, and metering with charge-back.

At the same time, subscribers expect to see implementation of a utility model since they want to allocate resources on-demand and pay exactly for their usage while being able to sustain their operations, much like the electric bill. Hence, new infrastructure should be agile and elastic and create an illusion of infinite computing resources available on-demand. While SOI did not offer the whole spectrum of the characteristics desired, it became an enabler for what came to be known as Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure (SOCCI). SOCCI can be defined as service-oriented, utility-based, manageable, scalable on-demand infrastructure that supports essential cloud characteristics, service, and deployment models. In other words, SOCCI describes the essentials for implementing and managing an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft acknowledged something it had hinted at during its Technology Preview for Windows 8 last September: It will be integrating a simplified form of storage pooling technology called Storage Spaces into Windows 8. Late yesterday in an MSDN blog post, engineer Surendra Verma, expanded on that theme by revealing new details about a very-high-capacity file system alternative for Windows Server 8, based around a modified resiliency architecture that should be in-place compatible with the existing NTFS.

The concept of resilience, or resiliency, in system architecture is based on tolerance and failure allowance. As the number of volumes encompassed by a huge file increases linearly, the threat of the file losing continuity increases exponentially. Resilience architecture utilizes the principle that certain failures must be fully expected, so systems must be planned for redundancy and loss avoidance.

Microsoft's new system, to be premiered in Windows Server 8 (which will be tested throughout 2012 and probably rolled out generally in 2013), is entitled ReFS. It is not, despite how its title may sound, a resurrection of the WinFS file system that Microsoft announced way back in 2003. That would have been an object file system geared for distributed search, and which the company hinted at the time could eventually render the use of Google search in the enterprise unnecessary.

ReFS is not about metadata or object storage in the sense of representing files as objects with characteristics. Rather, it's a multi-tier system of key/value pairs represented as B+ trees, with the pairs written as tables. A main object table serves as a root index, comprised of root trees, each of which represents a storage structure.

A "file" in ReFS looks to the rest of the operating system like a file in NTFS. Inside the file system, however, the directory table doesn't point directly to files, but instead to a B+ tree structure. That structure may be comprised of metadata tables that each point to various separate components of the file (pictured above) or perhaps to an access control list (ACL) designating access rights and privileges.

The implication here is that scaling the scope of any ReFS file, even beyond the sizes we're becoming acquainted with now, could be a simple matter of scaling the metadata tables. In Microsoft's new resilience architecture, the metadata that describes the identity and location of actual segments of the file - the parts containing the real bits - is never overwritten on top of itself. Or to use the company's terminology, metadata is never written "in place."

"To maximize reliability and eliminate torn writes, we chose an allocate-on-write approach that never updates metadata in-place, but rather writes it to a different location in an atomic fashion," Verma writes. "In some ways this borrows from a very old notion of 'shadow paging' that is used to reliably update structures on the disk. Transactions are built on top of this allocate-on-write approach. Since the upper layer of ReFS is derived from NTFS, the new transaction model seamlessly leverages failure recovery logic already present, which has been tested and stabilized over many releases."

It's almost as if everyone wants a real Internet, but too few want to lend a hand in building it. Now the Internet Society, its original non-profit guidance organization, is stepping up its push to make IPv6 more marketable, first with the launch of a new Web site called Deploy360, to be followed up next week with meetings with consumer electronics vendors at CES in Las Vegas.

"There are many organizations out there, including us, that are telling people they have to stop building on IPv4; they have to move to IPv6. A lot of folks just have not got what the implications are of continuing to move forward with IPv4," states Richard Jimmerson, the Internet Society's project lead for Deploy360, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "You're going to find a point where you can no longer grow, you can no longer innovate with your own products and services - along with everything else that's going on, on the Internet - with this limited IPv4 resource."

The dry well

The depletion of available IPv4 addresses has been a "dreaded" event for quite some time; and it's perhaps because of that perpetuated state - like an ailing dictator who just won't die already - that builders of enterprise networks have come to believe that the complete depletion of the old system will actually never happen. Unfortunately, it's during this same period that the Internet has evolved to support cloud services, where so many more addresses are required now than ever before.

"We're trying to reach out to organizations; we're doing everything we can to get the word out that they have to some more thinking," Jimmerson tells us. "They have to start moving to IPv6 now, so they don't run into a problem of not being able to grow their business just in the next couple of years."

Deploy360 is as assembly of "how" content, as Jimmerson calls it, explaining to different classes of Internet stakeholders - network operators, developers, content providers, CE manufacturers, and enterprise customers - ways to build transition agendas for their own businesses. He says there's already quite a bit of "why" information available, and while the Internet Society will continue to preach the "why's," a Resource Review Panel will locate and curate the "how" content that Deploy360 will feature.

"There has been so much work done over the years in IPv6 products and services that haven't seen the light of day yet," remarks Jimmerson. "People just haven't started marketing what it is they're doing yet." Major vendors such as Cisco and Microsoft already have IPv6 support built in, he adds, and those vendors are doing more than their fair share of evangelizing. It's the smaller vendors, however, that haven't gotten the message out that their own products are IPv6-capable, and may have been so for over a decade.

The first time I've heard that story

He tells us the story of his work with both the Internet Society and the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), speaking at conferences since the 1990s about the IPv6 transition. At one major consumer conference, a network products vendor with IPv6 already in its product line, was adjacent to the space where Jimmerson gave his talk.

Customers left that talk ready to make transition plans that moment. One customer stopped by the adjacent booth, where a representative listened to its story about the urgent need for IPv6 transition. The rep took down the customer's contact information, saying, "You're the first person to ask us about this!" Then the next customer in line presented a similar case. The rep then entered that customer onto the list, saying, "You're the first person to ask us about this!" And the next one, and the next one. By Jimmerson's count, he spoke to over a hundred customers that day.

He confronted the rep, saying his responses didn't make much sense for a company that was trying to sell exactly what these customers were asking for. The rep responded that his superiors had not yet finalized a marketing message for what he was allowed to say about the IPv6 support that his products already had.

While vendors procrastinated in assembling an IPv6 marketing message, the competitive stance of those vendors with respect to one another changed, Jimmerson went on. While the early IPv4 Internet was a collaborative effort, Jimmerson feels some vendors may be reluctant to elevate IPv6 to a priority, for fear that a competitor may gain an advantage in time-to-market. They're all ready to market, but no one wants to sound the gun unless someone else runs faster. And as a result, he remarks, customers don't perceive IPv6 as a real need, because vendors may be afraid to communicate it as such. "They believe in their mind that it's really not happening, and it's not true."

Lack of coordination about a transition plan may, Jimmerson warns, lead to a situation among broadband service providers where they fail to warn their customers to only purchase IPv6-supporting devices, including HDTVs and Blu-ray players, until after they've already made the transition in their own infrastructure.

It's with the hope of pre-empting this disaster that the Internet Society has planned an 80-minute tutorial for CE manufacturers, to be presented during next week's CES in cooperation with the IEEE, "giving them the very hard, sharp point about why they need to get moving quickly. At some point in the near future, residential broadband providers will begin advising their own customers about which devices will and won't work on their newly deployed IPv6 services in their homes. There could be a case, perhaps next year, where you have consumers returning products to electronics stores because they don't support IPv6."

(This article is a companion piece to analysis by Scott Fulton, which can be found here.)

First off, as my colleague Scott Fulton reminds me, Microsoft is like someone who can solve Rubic's Cube but who only knows how to get one side all one color at any one time. It could do several things to beat Salesforce, one of which is to completely embrace the SaaS model of applications.

But going 100% SaaS would end up sending a shot of poison to Office and to some degree Windows itself. This is Microsoft's second challenge: its legacy on the desktop and in packaged software will always be a reminder that this is where the profits lie, no matter how many cloud-based initiatives and press conferences it has weekly. (More like weakly.)

Microsoft would say, and rightly we think, that its justification for Windows on the client side - rather than some Web browser -- is that it runs the applications that businesses use and that most of us feel comfortable with. But the dynamics, if you were, are changing and the balance between the Web and Windows is changing. When was the last time anyone cared what OS you ran on your work PC? Is that so, 1997?

Finally, as the Web takes more mindshare of its developers, Microsoft still needs to support a vast army of legacy server businesses, such as Sharepoint, Exchange, and even its own Web server IIS. These aren't going away anytime soon, and indeed, the smarter developers are putting in hooks to various Salesforce apps from these servers as ways to embrace and extend this legacy. Harrumph - usually Microsoft likes to be in that driver's seat, and doing the embracing to keep its lock on its APIs.

So what can Microsoft do to become a force (ahem, sorry) to be reckoned with? It needs several things:

• First, make it easier to bring in Salesforce data into its own ecosystem.
• Second, consolidate all its numerous Live services so that one account can connect to all of them. Try using Live Mesh, Skydrive, and Hotmail for any length of time and you'll see what we mean.
• Come out with extensions to Silverlight and Visual Studio that make it the easiest and happiest place on the planet to build Force.com apps. He with the best tools wins developer mindshare.
• Finally, play nice in the HTML5 leagues and stop trying to set the agenda here. We don't want a replay of the Netscape scenario back when HTML was young. Accept the fact that Microsoft is just one player of many, and not in the lead here.

According to Amazon, Direct Connect is compatible with all AWS resources, so customers can hook up directly from their office, data center or other locations to Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Simple Storage Service (S3) and so on.

We've covered VPC previously, which allows companies to set up a private space within the AWS cloud that's only available via a VPN connection. However, until introducing its Direct Connect feature, companies have had to access the private cloud over their public connection. The company is pitching this as a way for organizations to hook into Amazon Web Services for applications that require "large and frequent data transfers," without inducing data congestion.

Amazon's Tera Randall gives the example of bio-pharmaceutical companies and film studios that are looking to extend their current data center into Amazon's cloud. "Many also want to use an isolated and controlled network space so they can simply extend their current data center into the cloud and use the same IP addressing scheme - as if it's in their datacenter. Organizations do just that with Amazon VPC, which allows you to provision a private, isolated section of the AWS cloud."

For more information and our take on the implications of Direct Connect, read our story here by David Strom.

Roll this up with Amazon's new identity features, and the company is providing a fairly compelling set of features for companies that want to hook their private network or cloud into Amazon's services almost seamlessly.

Direct connect is being rolled out first from Amazon's US-East region (via the Equinix facility in Ashburn, VA), with more rollouts planned over the next few months in San Jose, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Singapore.

Pricing for Direct Connect is $0.30 an hour for a 1Gbps port, and $2.25 an hour for a 10Gbps port – so a company utilizing a 10Gbps port for 30 days, all day, would be looking at about $1,620 a month for the service. Data transfer into AWS is free, and transfer out is $0.02 per GB. Amazon's Identity and Access Management is a free feature of AWS, so companies won't pay extra for tapping into the new identity features – just the additional services they'll be using.

On the group's website is its Open Cloud Principles, which focus on interoperability and on "avoiding barriers to entry or exit, ensuring technological neutrality and forbidding discrimination."

For example, standards must meet requirements for documentation that are freely usable and free of patents and copyrights. All functional interfaces, user data and metadata must be represented in open standard formats and interfaces.

Sam Johnston, founder and president of the group said, "The primary purpose of the Open Cloud Initiative is to define 'Open Cloud' by way of community consensus and advocate for universal adoption of Open Standard formats and interfaces." Johnston is Director, Cloud & IT Services at Equinix and previously worked at Google's team in Switzerland where he managed their global tape backup operation.

Other leading players with the group include a Cisco engineer, Sam Ramji who previously led Microsoft's open source efforts and now is VP of Stragegy at Apigee, and Noirin Plunkett, who is Executive Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation. Certainly the open source chops of this team are impeccable, but whether they will succeed in gathering any steam remains to be seen.

This isn't the first time that a group of open source folks have gathered on this topic at this show: we covered a similar open cloud story at last year's OSCON.

Together you can unify disparate local and cloud environments under a single federated identity. CFS delivers secure identity tokens to cloud-based applications that support SAML 1.1, 2.0, SharePoint 2007/2010, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, WebEx and WS-Federation. It can also federate with other Identity Providers, such as Windows Azure ACS and ADFS, as well as WAM/federation solutions, such as SiteMinder, Ping Federate, OpenAM, and Shibboleth. CFS supports Integrated Windows Authentication for identities belonging to different AD domains and forests, extending SSO to users residing in different AD forests.

The VDS solution has a configuration wizard that simplifies set-up, cutting down on deployment time and confusion, and can aggregate directories quickly and easily.

The issue is that every cloud not only has its silver lining, but its own directory structure, access controls, and user groups. The two products can provide a single sign on and connect to existing identity management tools. While there are single sign on tools, Radiant provides a centrally managed repository for the service.

Pricing is CPU-based and starts at $10,000 per CPU for CFS and $25,000 per CPU for VDS+.

QuickStart lets you assemble two different types of app stacks -- one based on Ruby, the other on Java/Tomcat -- and works in conjunction with accounts that you already have on Amazon's EC2 or Rackspace. When you use the service, you avoid having to reassmble your collection of apps and services, and also avoid having to start from scratch with creating a new machine image when some small configuration file changes in your deployment.

Using Chef, your stacks -- what they call cookbooks (get it?) -- are linked together, so that you can quickly propagate changes across all of them in your cloud infrastructure. Say you need to upgrade to a new version of Tomcat, or add a new server into your mix? Not a problem. You can grow or prune your virtual infrastructure dynamically and easily with this tool.

Hosted Chef QuickStart is available today. Pricing starts at $5/managed servers per month for 20 servers and scales up to $10/month for 1000 managed servers.

The stacks consist of Sun Blade servers, Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux, Oracle VM Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, Oracle/Sun ZFS storage solutions and Sun networking technology.

Unlike a projects like OpenStack and Eucalyptus, which provide software for managing a cloud infrastructure, Oracle is promoting an entire stack including hardware and software. It's probably most comparable to HP CloudSystemor Cisco Unified Computing System.

Last year Oracle submitted a proposal for a private cloud management API called the Oracle Cloud API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

By abstracting a lot of information into these basic blocks, it is faster to scale up a virtual server infrastructure. The vendors stated that it took 30 minutes to create persistent EqualLogic snapshot-based recovery copies of 500 virtual machines with a total of 15 TB datastore, largely because it was contained in a single building block. In another 30 minutes, you could replicate another 2,000 VMs.

The currently supported pieces of the architecture include Dell's PowerEdge Blade servers, EqualLogic Storage networking arrays, VMware vSphere/vCenter and CommVault's Simpana 9 storage management software. The latter is used to take snapshots of the current state of the VMs and used as part of the backup and provisioning efforts.

Obviously, for this architecture to be truly useful, other storage management and array vendors need to join with their support, but this is a good starting attempt at trying to make it easier for larger-scale mixed-vendor virtual environments to be more automatically provisioned. "We generally steer away from device-specific recipes that have relatively short lives. And we focus first on keeping the VMs running by eliminating storage-related disruptions altogether, irrespective of the hardware choices they make for storage or servers," says Augie Gonzalez, DataCore Software's product and channel marketing manager. DataCore makes SANSymphony, a competing storage manager to Simpana.

Prasanna says software like BigTable and MapReduce are "ancient, creaking dinosaurs" compared to open source alternatives like Apache Hadoop.

Prasanna blames the state of Google's software stack on it being designed by "engineers in a vacuum, rather than by developers who have need of tools."

If true, this speaks to the strength of open source - or at least of well maintained open source projects. Open source software can be improved by a wide variety of stake holders, but proprietary software will always be shielded from outside improvements. The open source alternatives have surpassed the proprietary versions that Google kept under lock and key, and Google isn't in a position to take advantage of the improvements made by the open source community without making some major infrastructural changes.

Also, if Prasanna's assessment is correct, it would support RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady's thesis that software infrastructure is no longer a competitive advantage. This is particularly relevant as Google markets its App Engine platform-as-a-service. The Register's Cade Metz recently wrote a long piece on Google App Engine as a means of accessing Google's infrastructure. Although the platform has made improvements in the past year, many developers have been unhappy with its restrictions.

Developers have been willing to accept the proprietary nature of the PaaS and its restrictions to access Google's infrastructure. But what if Google's infrastructure really isn't special? Cloud services powered by open services would then be even more desirable.

We've written before that "open" has won against proprietary, at least in rhetoric if not in practice. Thus far App Engine has bucked that trend. But for how much longer?

Plivo is an alternative to cloud based telecommuncations APIs like Tropo and Twilio, allowing developers to keep their telephony applications on premise.

One of the downsides to using a service like Tropo or Twilio is that you must those companies' choice of carriers and infrastructure. For many projects, that's going to be fine. But some customers are going to want more control.

Update: Tropo has let us know that its software is also open source and available for download for on-premise installations. You can find it in GitHub.

"We think there is great value in Plivo for developers and enterprises who want greater control over their telephony application," Nimish Adani, one of the project's developers, told us by e-mail "The use case for them is similar to why larger blogs would want to opt for a dedicated WordPress instance than a Posterous/Tumblr instance OR why some merchants would be better off using their own Magento installation than using Shopify."

The framework was built with Python, gevent and Flask. Plivo is completely unrelated to Twilio, but it does use a similar API.

Plivo is open source under the Mozilla Public License. The team is currently looking for sponsorship.

Among the various proposals in the act is one that would use The Domain Name System (DNS) to block blacklisted websites. This element of the proposal has come under fire from several security researchers who have published a paper titled Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill.

One of the co-authors is Dan Kaminsky, the security researcher famous for discovering a serious DNS security flaw. On his blog Kaminsky writes: "Filtering DNS traffic will not work, and in its failure, will harm both the security and stability of the Internet at large."

The paper highlights the value of DNS to both economic growth and cybersecurity, and says that the bill's DNS provisions would undermine other security systems that use DNS to detect and mitigate threats. "The site redirection envisioned in Section 3(d)(II)(A)(ii) is inconsistent with security extensions to the DNS that are known as DNSSEC. The U.S. Government and private industry have identified DNSSEC as a key part of a wider cyber security strategy, and many private, military, and governmental networks have invested in DNSSEC technologies," the report says.

The report also says that DNS filtering would be ineffective at stopping Internet piracy because the filters will be circumvented easily. It further notes that there could be "collateral damage" to non-infringing sites blocked due to infringing material elsewhere on a domain, which is what happened earlier this year when Homeland Security seized mooo.com.

The bill has been blocked for now, but we have the feeling Leahy and the other architects of the bill will be back.