Wow, that was fast. Amazon Web Services, which said three weeks ago it would begin offering Windows on its Elastic Compute Cloud in closed beta, has opened the beta service up for all. Even bigger news is the beta tag has been removed from the rest of the EC2 service, and users now have a 99.95 percent up-time service level agreement. Yesterday, Rackspace ran hard to keep up with Amazon’s cloud offerings — acquiring two startups — but, with a full production computing cloud out of beta, it looks like Amazon is still in the lead.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

On the old hyperion.com, there used to be a link one could visit to easily find out which operating systems were supported by which versions of the Hyperion products.  With the demise of Hyperion, the "platform matrixes" disappeared for the most part.  The ones that still existed were scattered all around the conflagration that is Oracle.com.  Due to an outcry from the user community, the support platform documents are all now in one place:http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/hyperion-supported-platforms.html

That said, they're not as easy to read as they once were and often the answers are buried in one of the documents on this page.  At least we now have one place to find all the documents, again, even if they're a mite confusing.

Did you know that it is possible to create a cube that is completely real-time? Where there is NO data stored in the cube or any other cube for that matter. How can this be, you ask yourself? It can’t be through partitioning because there is not any data stored in any cube. It can’t be through the use of an XREF function for the same reason. The answer is through the use of dynamically calculated members and customer defined functions (CDF).

I have always wanted to build my own personal Essbase stock market database that would give me investment information. I wanted it to use freely available market information and to have real-time stock prices. I found my source of this data on Yahoo Finance. You pass in a URL with parameters to Yahoo and it returns comma separated data.

My plan was to create a simple CDF that would generate the Yahoo URL and insert the necessary parameters. This would return the stock price for any stock symbol in real-time. I would use this CDF function in the calculation of a dynamically calculated member. When the dynamically calculated member is queried, it launches the URL and retrieves the data just as if it existed in the cube.

I was able to achieve my dream cube and it works great. This technique of using a CDF within a dynamically calculated member works for other data sources as well. I have CDF functions that retrieve data from a flat file, SQL database and an in-memory variable.

One caveat to this solution: the query performance is not sub-second. But for me, I can live with slower performance to have my dream cube.

The backend servers that power the world of Internet Services have become increasingly diverse. With today's announcement that Microsoft Windows Server is available on Amazon EC2 we can now run the majority of popular software systems in the cloud. Windows Server ranked very high on the list of requests by customers so we are happy that we will be able to provide this.

One particular area that customers have been asking for Amazon EC2 with Windows Server was for Windows Media transcoding and streaming. There is a range of excellent codecs available for Windows Media and there is a large amount of legacy content in those formats. In past weeks I met with a number of folks from the entertainment industry and often their first question was: when can we run on windows?

There are many different reasons why customers have requested Windows Server; for example many customers want to run ASP.NET websites using Internet Information Server and use Microsoft SQL Server as their database. Amazon EC2 running Windows Server enables this scenario for building scalable websites. In addition, several customers would like to maintain a global single Windows-based desktop environment using Microsoft Remote Desktop, and Amazon EC2 is a scalable and dependable platform on which to do so.

Amazon EC2 with Windows Server is still currently in private beta testing, but will be available for general use before the end of the year. Keep an eye on the AWS Weblog for information about Amazon Web Services at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference.

So after the Oracle’s announcement about putting the database and other tools in the cloud I thought is would be timely to do a post on some work being done by a partner, Full360, with Essbase and the Amazon Cloud.  Here is a blog from Full360 that gives you step by step instructions on getting a copy of their Essbase image up in the Amazon Cloud.

http://www.full360.com/content/using-cubeflex-basic-edition-ami-start-using-essbase-amazon-ec2

This is a real cutting edge thing and it is nice to see Essbase at the front end of it.  The possibilities are endless with Essbase and the vast amounts scale the cloud can provide.

To learn more about cloud computing check out this link. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cloud+computing

For a project I wrote a script that changes key database settings with MaxL.  Nothing too special here just thought it would be a nice one to share.  Here is a link to download the files.  Once extracted use the file properties.msh to edit the settings and enter key fields like username and password.

In a recent blog post, I expressed my dedication to installing Essbase 11.1.1 and, I figured that while I was installing it, I should document the steps to help others visualize how to do it. Some people who may be reading this may have never installed Essbase, so I will go into a lot of detail. Those of you who have installed Essbase a number of times may not need all of this detail and so you may want to skim through parts of this document. That being said, this is the first version shipped with the new Oracle Installer and is just different enough that a tutorial may be necessary.

Before you can start the install, you will need to download the files necessary for the install. To get the files, go to http://edelivery.oracle.com/ and select the ‘Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System’. To create this tutorial, I downloaded and am installing the 32-bit version on my own primary laptop.

Once you have the necessary files downloaded, start by creating a temporary work directory. On my system, I created a directory named C:\Temp\EPM 11.1.1 Install. Once you have done that, unzip the System Installer (V13452-01.zip) into the work directory. Here is what it looked like when I unzipped the file on my machine:



Next, repeat the process with the 3 Foundation Services zip files into the same directory. Those zip files are:

· V13449-01.zip
· V13450-01.zip
· V13494-01.zip

As you unzip each of these files, what is happening ‘behind the scenes’ is that xml files are being added to the work directory structure. Additionally, files are being added to the ‘assemblies’ subdirectory. The ‘assemblies’ subdirectories contain the actual installation components. Here is what my ‘assemblies’ subdirectory looked like after unzipping the foundation services:



If you are prompted to overwrite a file as I was, press ‘YesToAll’ to continue.



Next, locate and run the InstallTool.cmd file that is unzipped as part of the installer. If you haven’t unzipped any product zip files into the installation directories, you will get a pretty nasty looking error when you run the InstallTool.cmd. The error is a java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException which sounds a lot worse than it really is. This error appears because the Java runtime expects to find some installation code to execute and, as the code doesn’t exist in the installer directories, it throws a java exception. I have seen a number of people get that exception already with 11.1.1 and am a bit surprised that the installer does not do a better job of giving a more informative error message.

If you have properly unzipped file into the directories, you will get see the following Installer screen. Note the steps oriented along the left margin of the dialog that will help you keep track of your progress.



Hit ‘Next’ and you will be at the ‘Destination’ step of the Installer:



Choose the location where you would like to install the Hyperion components. On my machine it defaulted to C:\Hyperion. I don’t know if this default applies to a clean machine or not as I previously had Essbase installed in that directory. I did, however, attempt to clean up HYPERION_HOME and other environment variables for Essbase before starting the install. You may have different results. Hit ‘Next’ to proceed to the ‘Installation Type’ step of the Installer:



If you select ‘Choose components by tier’ and hit ‘Next’, the ‘Product Selection’ step of the Installer will look like this:



Otherwise, if you select ‘Choose components individually’ and hit ‘Next’, the ‘Product Selection’ step of the Installer will look like this:



Note that the products that appear in the selection box are based on the product zips that you unzipped into the installation directory.

Once you have selected the products to install, press the ‘Next’ button to proceed to the ‘Confirmation’ step of the Installer:



Click ‘Next’ to begin the installations. The progress is then reported in the dialog and took something like 10 to 20 minutes on my laptop. After the installations are complete, the ‘Summary’ step shows the status of the installed products:



At this point, I pressed the ‘Configure’ button and the EPM System Configurator was launched. Although I didn’t try it, I would guess the ‘Finish’ button would just close the Installer. Note that after installation the ‘EPM System Configurator’ is available on the Windows Start Menu under All Programs, Oracle EPM System, Foundation Services, EPM System Configurator.

The Configurator opens and displays a welcome screen:



Press the ‘Next’ button to choose the components to configure:



Once you select ‘Next’, the items selected will determine the information that will be prompted in the following screens. With the default selections for the products I installed, the next screen requested information for the database underlying Shared Services. I am running Oracle 11g on my laptop and thus the configuration looks like this:



I always write down the settings so I don’t forget them:

Database Type: Oracle
Server: mustang
Port: 1521
Service Name or SID: orcl
Username: SYSTEM
Password: password

Hit the ‘Next’ button and you are prompted for common system settings:



Hit the ‘Next’ button and you are prompted for specific database system settings for EAS and Essbase Studio:



As I am using the previously configured database, I didn’t have to change anything on this screen. Hit the ‘Next’ button to go to the next screen which prompts you to select the application server as shown below:



Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually say what component is to be deployed to an application server; hopefully it applies to all of the applications that use an application server. The default is to automatically deploy to the ‘Embedded Java Container’. Upon further investigation, it appears the ‘Embedded Java Container’ is Tomcat 5.5.17 which is a newer version of Tomcat than the version 5.0.28 that shipped with Essbase 9.3.1.

Now that I played the guessing game about what applications are being configured, I hit the ‘Next’ button and was presented with the following dialog that allows the user to specify the port that each individual application will run on:



There are a couple of things to note in this dialog. The default Shared Services port for Tomcat has changed from 11.1.1 to 28080. In version 9.3.1, the default port was 58080. Further, the default port for the HAB.Net web service also changed (at least it changed from the time when I actually wrote the service). I typically take the default ports for my services.

Hit the ‘Next’ button to advance to the next step in the Configurator which prompts for Essbase configuration information:



There are a couple of noteworthy default values on this step of the wizard. First, the ARBORPATH specified looks like a very non-standard location if you are an experienced Essbase person. First, the ‘products’ subdirectory is a very ‘Oracle’ naming convention. In fact, on my laptop Oracle 11g is installed in C:\Oracle\product\11.1.0. Second, I find it odd that the ARBORPATH variable checkbox is not checked by default. The installation documentation is pretty clear on this issue. If you are upgrading, the following upgrade note is in the docs:

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Essbase, specify the same application location you used in the previous release.

The docs also comment on the ‘Set ARBORPATH checkbox’ in saying:

If you do not update the environment variables during configuration, update them manually.

Based on that comment, I am going to check the checkbox before I continue. Further, I didn’t know exactly what the ‘Deploy Essbase in standalone mode’ did. The install documentation for this this setting states ‘select to use legacy security for Essbase Server instead of Shared Services security’. I am also going to select this option as I don’t want to have my Essbase security automatically externalized to Shared Services. My reason for not externalizing is that if security is not externalized, then you can run Essbase without having Shared Services running. Despite the fact that my laptop is pretty powerful (Core2 Duo w/4 Gb RAM), I sometimes shut down Shared Services and Oracle to maximize memory; Essbase will run fine without Shared Services running in using this configuration.

This is how the dialog looked when I hit the ‘Next’ button:



Finally, the information gathering is complete and you have one final chance to confirm everything before the configuration starts:



Hit ‘Next’ and let it rip! Once it is complete, here is what the dialog should look like:



The ‘Register with Shared Services’ task failed as I chose to install Essbase in standalone mode.

Now that installation is complete, here are the services that are running:



Note that OpenLDAP, Shared Services, HABNet and Provider Services all started up but Essbase did not nor will it start if when I try to start the service. The procedure you should follow if this occurs is to try to run Essbase in a command window where any errors will be displayed in the window.

Navigating to start Essbase manually was really my first chance to explore the new directory structure. In the System 9 version, the different parts of the system were installed in the HYPERION_HOME location which was typically C:\Hyperion on a windows system. In version 11.1.1, all of the products are rooted in the new ‘products’ subdirectory with the Essbase subsystem products in ‘products\Essbase’ and Shared Services in ‘products\Foundation’. Here is what my ‘products\Essbase’ directory looks like:



To start Essbase in a command window, you have to navigate to the ‘products\Essbase\Essbase Server\bin’ subdirectory, type ‘essbase’ and press Enter. Here is the result:



It now occurs to me that I was not prompted to enter this basic Essbase information during the install probably due to the fact that security externalization is now the default behavior. The person who installs Essbase and choose ‘standalone’ mode is apparently now responsible to start Essbase in the command window and enter the basic Essbase security information. Actually, this was standard operating procedure back in the early days of Essbase. Here is a screenshot after I started Essbase and entered the information:



Once I entered these items when I started Essbase in the command window the first time, the service started and ran normally.

After following these steps, I was up and running with Essbase and the other products I had selected. Within a few days, I plan to post a PDF file with this content to make it easier for you to print this content. Finally, I hope your installation experience is a smooth as mine was.

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Essbase is a rare and beautiful thing. It doesn’t take much to get it, as most financial oriented managers have learned. Anybody who loves Excel, and there are millions of us, love Essbase for what it does. Nobody should ever forget that the ESS in Essbase stands for Extended Spread Sheet. It was de ...

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If your enterprise has access to the same things — virtualization, automation, performance management, ITIL, skilled IT resources, etc. — as cloud service providers, would clouds provide any real and sustainable benefit?

Public utility cloud services differ from traditional data center environments — and private enterprise clouds — in three fundamental ways. First, they provide true on-demand services, by multiplexing demand from numerous enterprises into a common pool of dynamically allocated resources. Second, large cloud providers operate at a scale much greater than even the largest private enterprises. Third, while enterprise data centers are naturally driven to reduce cost via consolidation and concentration, clouds — whether content, application or infrastructure — benefit from dispersion. These three key differences in turn enable the sustainable strategic competitive advantage of clouds through what I???ll call the 10 Laws of Cloudonomics.

Cloudonomics Law #1: Utility services cost less even though they cost more.
An on-demand service provider typically charges a utility premium — a higher cost per unit time for a resource than if it were owned, financed or leased. However, although utilities cost more when they are used, they cost nothing when they are not. Consequently, customers save money by replacing fixed infrastructure with clouds when workloads are spiky, specifically when the peak-to-average ratio is greater than the utility premium.

Cloudonomics Law #2: On-demand trumps forecasting.
The ability to rapidly provision capacity means that any unexpected demand can be serviced, and the revenue associated with it captured. The ability to rapidly de-provision capacity means that companies don???t need to pay good money for non-productive assets. Forecasting is often wrong, especially for black swans, so the ability to react instantaneously means higher revenues, and lower costs.

Cloudonomics Law #3: The peak of the sum is never greater than the sum of the peaks.
Enterprises deploy capacity to handle their peak demands ??? a tax firm worries about April 15th, a retailer about Black Friday, an online sports broadcaster about Super Sunday. Under this strategy, the total capacity deployed is the sum of these individual peaks. However, since clouds can reallocate resources across many enterprises with different peak periods, a cloud needs to deploy less capacity.

Cloudonomics Law #4: Aggregate demand is smoother than individual.
Aggregating demand from multiple customers tends to smooth out variation. Specifically, the ???coefficient of variation??? of a sum of random variables is always less than or equal to that of any of the individual variables. Therefore, clouds get higher utilization, enabling better economics.

Cloudonomics Law #5: Average unit costs are reduced by distributing fixed costs over more units of output.
While large enterprises benefit from economies of scale, larger cloud service providers can benefit from even greater economies of scale, such as volume purchasing, network bandwidth, operations, administration and maintenance tooling.

Cloudonomics Law #6: Superiority in numbers is the most important factor in the result of a combat (Clausewitz).
The classic military strategist Carl von Clausewitz argued that, above all, numerical superiority was key to winning battles. In the cloud theater, battles are waged between botnets and DDoS defenses. A botnet of 100,000 servers, each with a megabit per second of uplink bandwidth, can launch 100 gigabits per second of attack bandwidth. An enterprise IT shop would be overwhelmed by such an attack, whereas a large cloud service provider — especially one that is also an integrated network service provider — has the scale to repel it.

Cloudonomics Law #7: Space-time is a continuum (Einstein/Minkowski)
A real-time enterprise derives competitive advantage from responding to changing business conditions and opportunities faster than the competition. Often, decision-making depends on computing, e.g., business intelligence, risk analysis, portfolio optimization and so forth. Assuming that the compute job is amenable to parallel processing, such computing tasks can often trade off space and time, for example a batch job may run on one server for a thousand hours, or a thousand servers for one hour, and a query on Google is fast because its processing is divided among numerous CPUs. Since an ideal cloud provides effectively unbounded on-demand scalability, for the same cost, a business can accelerate its decision-making.

Cloudonomics Law #8: Dispersion is the inverse square of latency.
Reduced latency — the delay between making a request and getting a response — is increasingly essential to delivering a range of services, among them rich Internet applications, online gaming, remote virtualized desktops, and interactive collaboration such as video conferencing. However, to cut latency in half requires not twice as many nodes, but four times. For example, growing from one service node to dozens can cut global latency (e.g., New York to Hong Kong) from 150 milliseconds to below 20. However, shaving the next 15 milliseconds requires a thousand more nodes. There is thus a natural sweet spot for dispersion aimed at latency reduction, that of a few dozen nodes — more than an enterprise would want to deploy, especially given the lower utilization described above.

Cloudonomics Law #9: Don???t put all your eggs in one basket.
The reliability of a system with n redundant components, each with reliability r, is 1-(1-r)n. So if the reliability of a single data center is 99 percent, two data centers provide four nines (99.99 percent) and three data centers provide six nines (99.9999 percent). While no finite quantity of data centers will ever provide 100 percent reliability, we can come very close to an extremely high reliability architecture with only a few data centers. If a cloud provider wants to provide high availability services globally for latency-sensitive applications, there must be a few data centers in each region.

Cloudonomics Law #10: An object at rest tends to stay at rest (Newton).
A data center is a very, very large object. While theoretically, any company can site data centers in globally optimal locations that are located on a core network backbone with cheap access to power, cooling and acreage, few do. Instead, they remain in locations for reasons such as where the company or an acquired unit was founded, or where they got a good deal on distressed but conditioned space. A cloud service provider can locate greenfield sites optimally.

Joe Weinman is Strategic Solutions Sales VP for AT&T Global Business Services. The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of AT&T.

This post also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.