A start-up company has recently come out of stealth-mode and its technology is going to change how companies think about cloud-computing. Numecent announced new technology they’re calling cloudpaging. It allows companies to turn software, any software, into a cloud app and rent the apps out for whatever length of time they want. The first step is using their Jukebox Studio tool to “‘cloudify” an application. This doesn’t require any changes to an application or access to source code. In Numcent’s own words, “This process pre-virtualizes the application, encrypts it and divides it into small fragments called ‘pages’.” This process is completed once per application and takes anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Unlike other offerings out there, Numecent says it will work with 100 percent of Windows applications and even work on plug-ins for applications. Numecent even says they can deliver the operating system and large virtual machines this way. The application is then published to a server hosting the Jukebox Server. With their Jukebox Server, licensing can be applied to an app so that users can check out a license to use an app and then check the license back in when they’re done. This cloudified application is now open to users who have the Jukebox Player installed on their local machine.
So, how is this different from other technologies? Numecent’s cloudpaging is only delivered one page at a time using demand paging. After enough pages have been fetched, the application starts to run. Numecent says most applications only require about 6.5 percent to be fetched before a user can start using the program and that this is nothing like pixel streaming. Pixel streaming is when a program is run on a server and the display, the actual pixels, of the application is delivered to a PC over the internet. The biggest problem with pixel streaming is that this works great for video and music, where content is linear and bits follow one another, but it doesn’t work well for applications, which are non-linear, because users bounce around an application. This can be a huge problem for a processor intensive application.
Cloudpaging solves this problem by basically sending processor instructions over the internet instead of pixels. Numecent calls this friction-free computing. When you virtualize anything, an application or a virtual machine, there’s a virtual memory manager unit (MMU) that manages the physical RAM available to the virtualized environment. Numecent’s MMU doesn’t manage local RAM, but instead it manages demand paging by only fetching the parts of the application needed to run locally. Basically, you can run any application on-demand from any computer in an almost instant-on manner. Numecent has a video demonstrating the launching of a 66 GB Hyper-V virtual machine from a server after only downloading 900 MB, and the company claims 20 to 60 times reduction in time needed to launch a virtualized applications. When the user is done with an application, they shut it down and there’s virtually no trace left on their computer.
What makes this even more exciting is not what they already have, but what’s planned. Everything previously mentioned is already commercially available. Numecent plans to include heuristic pushing of pages to this new technology. The Jukebox Server will gather statistics of the most used bits and push pages likely to be used before the Jukebox Player even requests. This will further reduce the latency and increase the speed that applications can be delivered. As a side note, I bet that independent software vendors (ISVs) could make great use of the statistics Numecent gathers to determine the most widely used features in their software.
In a Forbes.com article, Stefan Ried, principal analyst for platform strategies at market researcher Forrester, says he hasn’t seen anything like this before. He also points out that because this technology could be used for so many different things, its hard to put Numecent into one market category. Its applicable to so many different applications, such as file sharing and synchronization (like Dropbox), application virtualization (like Citrix), and also to gaming (like Onlive). In fact, Numecent CEO Osman Kent agrees. Kent thinks it would be hard to market this technology for all the applications it can handle. Because of that, Kent is spinning off companies, such as Approxy for gaming, to deliver to different market segments. Kent also says that Numecent, which has 10 patents and 10 more patents pending, is talking with other companies interested in funding future spinoffs.
There are not many times in your life that you can say you were around when a paradigm shift occurred in technology or business. This is one of them.
The only thing I don’t understand is their claim that it works offline. Everything else sounds amazing and feasible.