My friend Nikola Bozinovic (say that three times fast) is a very sharp software developer originally from Serbia who has, over the years, worked for most of the usual suspect American software companies. He is also the guy who restored from a grotty old VHS tape my film Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview. And as of this week he’s the CEO of Mainframe2 (now called Frame — Bob) , an exciting startup strutting its stuff at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara. Mainframe2 claims it can put almost any Windows application into the cloud, making apps usable from any device that can run a web browser supporting html5. We’re talking Photoshop and AutoCAD on your iPad. This is a big deal.
Normally moving an app from a PC to a server and then virtualizing it in the cloud is a multistep process that can take weeks or months to get running smoothly but Nikola says Mainframe2 can do the job in about 10 minutes. The application code runs across many virtual machines in the cloud and — this is especially important — supports nVIDIA’s virtual GPU standard, so graphics performance is especially strong. And that’s the point, because it’s graphically-intensive apps like video editing that Mainframe2 will be targeting from the start when its service becomes commercially available later this fall.
Here’s what I find exciting about this. First, it’s cross-platform. The apps are (so far) all Windows, but the user can be on a Mac or anything else that supports html5. Next Mainframe2 appears to use an application rental model. I use Photoshop maybe six times per year so renting makes a lot more sense than owning. Renting the software I can pay a few dollars rather than hundreds. I don’t have to worry about keeping the application current. I don’t even need a powerful computer, since all the crunching takes place in the cloud.
Need 100 virtual GPUs for your iPhone? Okay.
If I used Photoshop all day every day of course I’d want my own local copy, but even then I can see emergencies happening where being able to edit on a smart phone might save the day.
VentureBeat wrote about Mainframe2 an hour or so ago and they complained about latency. It’s probably there but as an idiot I just don’t care that much and Nikola says it won’t be noticeable by the time the service is widely available. I believe him and here’s why. Mainframe2 sends the screen image as an H.264 video stream, so there’s some challenge to encode commands going in one direction, run the app, then send encoded video back. But that’s nothing compared to Nikola’s last job which was processing commands from pilots sitting in Oklahoma flying Predator drones in Afghanistan then cleaning-up the return video signal so the pilots could see what they were shooting at, all in real time of course and over a multi-link satellite connection.
Compared to that, remote AutoCAD is easy.
Mainframe2 is a form of remote computing but it isn’t VNC or RDP, it isn’t VMware or Citrix, it’s something totally new that can scale power like crazy (as many CPUs and GPUs as you like) which those others can’t. I wonder what people will end up doing with it? Because I’m sure this will tap a vein of creativity in the user community.
I wonder, too, whether the software vendors will love it or hate it? Probably both. Remember this application-in-a-browser idea was what turned Bill Gates and Microsoft against Netscape in the mid-1990s.
Of course all is blissful when it’s still a demo rather than a shipping service, but there is very solid technology here that deserves a look.
And no, I don’t own any shares in the company, though I wish I did.
I refer anyone reading this to the comment I wrote on Bob’s previous article. Where’s all the bandwidth coming from to support heavy-duty video editing via some cloud-based application? Ever tried uploading even a medium-res clip to YouTube?.
Yes, I know it’ll all come together in the end, but right now most of us have 3Mb/s download and 600K upload speeds. If I’m going to edit video I’d rather be using the software on my coal-fired tin-box desktop.
It’s the 600kb upload that is the killer, and the reason why I don’t do online backups. If people want to go to online storage for their apps, that needs to be addressed.
In this case, it’s all about your download speeds and H.264 is pretty efficient at delivering video bandwidth wise. Upload would only need to be used for sending commands which is pretty light-weight. 600 kbps would be plenty.
But media have to get out into the cloud in the first place. If you’ve taken video and want to get it to the cloud, then you have to upload it. Camera pics? Same thing. Recording a band? Ditto.
If the data is already there, then great. But that upload limitation is still a big one.
I know that at minimum AutoCAD won’t be able to run in the Cloud. Actually let me rephrase that: it will work, but the EULA prohibits from deploying the software in the cloud to access it anywhere. Not even your own copy. The only company that can deploy AutoCAD or any Autodesk product in the cloud is Autodesk themselves apparently. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the same for Adobe products.
As for renting, why would I rent a semi-laggy version of AutoCAD or Photoshop when both companies offer rentals for each software in the first place? And you get to run it locally, without any waiting times to upload your media and then redownload it afterwards.
I’m surprised you are even mentionning this. Didn’t OnLive have a virtual PC with Windows and Office running in the cloud two or three years ago?
Why do you believe that a company can’t license their software on different terms to different licensees? EULAs are for the little people. The big people have privileges you can’t even dream of.
Maybe the big guys will have more pull, but Autodesk wants their money. They also don’t want to deal with issues caused by cloud deployments, because they will have to set up their own internal cloud deployments to make sure that AutoCAD is guaranteed to work, and that costs money to debug and certify.
Same for Adobe. They’re very in love with their new subscription model, but it involves you handing your money to Adobe, not Mainframe2. that may change eventually of course, but don’t plan on running Photoshop in the cloud next week.
super-powerful Windows apps…
Isn’t that an oxymoron?
Yea, I’m having a really hard time believing this will not be frustrating with a program like Photoshop. I’m sure Word and Excel will work fine, but no way on Earth are you editing images that are 5 to 15 Mb over the internet without serious delays on almost every edit.
Besides the bandwidth issue and the upload we are limited to by our providers, there is every server you are going through to get from A to B and every choke point that is goes with it.
The idea is amazing, I have always argued that I want to own my Word app because I shouldn’t have to worry about a connection to write a document , but for the few times a year I need to edit a picture I agree this would be great, but much like the article Bob wrote yesterday, it feels like it’s living 10 years in the future.
As I understand it, file size is irrelevant (except for uploading it to the program in the cloud in the first place). Only relevant thing is download bandwith and that is related to the screen resolution on your access device. Like watching youtube but interractive. 264 encoding is on the cloud side. Upload is only input events. Cool, but as othe reader pointed out it will work on devices with similar input paradigm as the emulated program. Hard to hit the pixel with your finger.
This sounds a lot like Larry Ellison’s “network computer” concept of the late 1990s.
Why so much activity around “the Cloud?” Are businesses really moving their IT infrastructure out of the corporate data center and outsourcing? Most people who use Dropbox for business are violating their company’s internal document controls. And despite a friendly court system, I really don’t know of any business that wants the NSA, FBI or any other 3 letter organization access to their corporate nervous system. And people are starting to get a little uncomfortable with the ever-changing terms Google keeps making to their products.
As for individuals, we’re starting to see the massive devaluation of software, which is long overdue. I have been running Linux for the past 10 years or so, but in a recent bout of laziness, bought a Macbook Pro. I’m amazed at the prices Apple and others are charging for products in the app store. $300 for Final Cut Pro vs $19/month (forever, I’m assuming) for Adobe Premere, $999 for Avid Media Composer 7? Easy choice there. $.99 apps for Android and iOS? No sweat.
The next stage will be when someone figures out how to make home servers popular. Apple could do it, if they saw a reason to (they already have all those time machine backup drives hanging on airports). Others have been trying for a while now with limited success but with difficult to use GUIs and limited applications.
Personally, if I could get a static IP address from my ISP for a reasonable price, I’d already have my own mail server, wordpress blog site and maybe even an ongoing online store/garage sale. And when you have a 4TB dropbox for a one time fee (buying the drive) of $150, behind the doors of your own home (which changes the rules for the 3 letter agencies) it makes the 100GB $9.95/mo plan on Dropbox look like a real sucker bet.
No, they aren’t. But what “corporate data center” is, if not a private cloud? What if private corporations want to operate their data centers in the same manner as the cloud providers operate theirs? Why not to install apps on their servers and give access to there for customers from anywhere? Why not to use their power for that? This is happening already and it will be happening more and more in the future.
Granted, this startup doesn’t target private deployment and its a huge oversight on their side. But overall, I believe we need a challenger for last century’s RDP and VNC protocols.
“What if private corporations want to operate their data centers in the same manner as the cloud providers operate theirs?” Apparently they want to avoid running their own and use the cloud as a less expensive alternative. With that approach a small number of network operators can run the IT for many companies. Look at it this way…Linux is free but the people who know how to use it aren’t.
Fifth suckaaas!!!!
Are the hardware latencies in the path from user to servers really so small that they
are negligible? If you try to solve this problem in software, software latencies are the only
ones you get to remove…
Rupe
Interesting article. I wish you could spell Photoshop correctly.
Fixed!
I really don’t think Nikola’s experience with drones is relevant when it comes to fixing this lag issue. With drones, all of the smarts is on the plane. If the operator wants to shoot something, he points to the object on the video feed, it sends the geo coordinates to the drone, and the drone knows what to do and how to do it. It isn’t like a live joystick. Latency isn’t a big issue with how they control the drones because of this.
Latency will kill this. Even typing, you’d be about 1 to 2 seconds behind seeing the letters as you type. Encoding video, even hardware encoding, isn’t free and takes time and then pushing it over the internet will be problematic. Could you do this in an internal network where you have gigabit bandwidth? Probably. Over the internet, good luck.
No, it’s a far bigger deal than that. The Predator isn’t nearly as autonomous as you think and the target absolutely has to be visually verified. The software from MotionDSP is amazing. You’ll learn more by going to their website. It’s called Ikena.
That’s where I buy my furniture!
“Need 100 virtual GPUs for your iPhone? Okay.” Sounds like just the ticket for cracking passwords.
You can do that with any cloud hosting solution. Though password cracking can be done with sub 1000 dollar pc’s just fine.
Josh is correct about the latency issue. However one has to understand the source or cause of the latency. Most (all?) of the current technology uses screen scraper techniques. Software scan’s every pixel on the screen and produces a data stream from it. Even on the same physical LAN, the latency is noticeable. The of H.264 to sends the screen image as a video stream is an important difference, maybe even an important improvement. There are high performance chipsets that do this in hardware.
.
Will this approach be enough of an improvement to make a difference? I don’t know, but I hope so.
.
I am from Missouri (really) and we have a saying here “Show Me.” We won’t know for sure until we can experience this new service first hand. I do think Bob’s friend has some noteworthy ideas to improve the state of the art. I hope it works.
interesting. If that’s true, then using H.264 encoding instead of screen scraping on a _local_ machine would yield even more dramatic results. Maybe not so much from the user interaction perspective as present day video cards etc. are screaming fast already, but if the same performance could be accomplished for a fraction of the C/GPU cycles and what not we might see some truly amazing battery life.
Maybe this could be used enterprise wide on an application server, It shouldn’t have to be on the cloud, just on the LAN or WAN.
I’m going to have to disagree with the above comments and say that latency will NOT be an issue for large programs such as photoshop, instead it will be an issue for lightweight programs like a text editor. Uploading commands and downloading video will create a lag, encoding that video will also create a lag, but it needs to be compared processor lag when running locally. Has anyone attempted to run After Effects on a laptop with 4gbs of memory? Things are SLOW, the application doesn’t feel responsive until you hit at least 16gbs of memory and a powerful processor, even then there is delay. If this solution can remove most of the hardware lag from these complex software packages the bandwidth lag will be insignificant. Remember that even if dealing with an extremely high resolution PSD with multiple layers, or and HD after effects file, your system will only need to download a moderate resolution screengrab, so most of the data stays on the server.
We’re not saying latency will no longer be a problem. The hope is it will be less of a problem. If you supporting servers in the USA from India, latency will always be a problem. You can’t change the laws of physics. Obviously the closer the users are to the servers, the better.
.
My point is this. The current process to convert the display of a pc or server to a data stream takes time. I have 4 PC’s in my office and sometimes use remote desktop to work on one PC from another. I can see the time lag between the PC displays.
.
If the process to convert the display is done faster and in hardware, that will help. If a better data stream (H.264) is used, that would help.
.
Again I am from Missouri and will hold judgement until they “show me.” I believe this will be a better service. How much better remains to be seen.
Robert, thanks for your article and your kind words.
We’re signing people up for private beta on our website, but I’d like to offer early access to all commenters on Bob’s site (send an email to beta@mainframe2.com and mention Bob’s site). Or see a screencast demo on our site (done on a very average Astound cable). Seeing is believing.
@David Streaming protocols are now extremely efficient and adaptive. And it’s download speed that matters, not upload. Every Dropbox user (>200M) already keeps all of hers data in the cloud.
@Josh You’re correct — for good user experience 2Mbps down and 100kbps up with a decent ping is plenty. Most networks are already there. Drone experience is relevant indeed — it’s all streaming video, after all.
@Albert Citrix is already making billions of dollars doing similar things over LAN.
@ jfboismenu @Jonathan We work with many software vendors already to power their cloud distribution. Stay tuned.
Yes, some apps will never move to the cloud. But vendors, enterprises, and end users will soon have an option to run apps there. Many will run great. Networks are good and getting faster, servers more powerful, and data is already in the cloud. Hard for us to bet against it.
Photoshop on an iPad isn’t the best example you can give. It will be useless on a small screen and useless without a mouse and keyboard. So let’s focus the examples on laptop/desktops.
Photoshop’s UI is approaching impenetrability without trying to use it on an iPad, but existing VNC clients allow you to use desktop apps quite nicely on an iPad without a keyboard or mouse (indeed, the client I use handles multiple monitors as well, and lets me send mouse events and use a keyboard translucently overlaid on the the display, complete with sticky modifier keys).
I think any latency is going to make working with video editors and 3d programs very tough. Controlling a predator drone isn’t so much about interactively using fine-motor skills to get a very specific result so much as correctly selecting something. I suspect Josh’s objections are in fact very accurate.
I wish Nikola Bozinovic the best of luck so that users can get off the Microsoft and Apple upgrade treadmills. Planned Obsolescence belongs in the last century. Users would install Linux and Firefox on their existing machines when the newest versions of Microsoft and Apple OS will not run on them, and they would never look back.
You think Firefox is a good program to run? That is one buggy mess. It can’t even display page source properly.
“… Users would install Linux and Firefox on their existing machines…” Then why not do it now. The trend is going the other way. Even full Windows and Mac OSX are so complex that Microsoft and Apple, along with their users, are embracing simpler mobile versions of their products. Similarly Android is way more popular than Linux, unless you want to call it “Linux” because of it’s heritage.
How do they do that? I bet it’s based on https://www.winehq.org/ on a mainframe, which makes me wonder why nobody seems to have done this before. The graphics-to-HTML5 part is probably the hard part.
Looks like Chromebooks have a future afterall!
That’s the best comment yet 😉
The demo is promising, and I sure hope this takes off. There are many applications which require higher-end computing resources but which do not travel well on a notebook or tablet. Hopefully GIS and other geospatial will be available alongside more mainstream apps. I am located in New Zealand, and I am very curious if the mainframe2 will be usable in the early stages while being served from the west coast.
When they target photshop users and video editors the big question for me is:
How do I get my assets onto the mainframe server to start working?
As an editor I am usually handed over harddrives with hundreds of gigabytes of footage.
I certainly cannot load them up to mainframe.
Send in the discs?
I used to work for a WAN Optimization vendor and for the most part our product could optimize applications, storage (backups, replication),video, etc. with protocol optimization, caching, compression and deep protocol support. BUT the one set of apps we really couldn’t optimize were Google’s. Why? Because every time you typed a letter or such, Google would send it immediately to the cloud and start per-processing. Downstream-wise the data segments were made much smaller which made it harder to optimize (byte caching). In essence Google had gone beyond just developing the application…. they focused on developing the interaction between the user and the application. Microsoft is(was) attempting to do the same with its cloud-based applications as well.
Getting off the video game hardware upgrade cycle would make this a ‘killer app’ for many. If you can deliver outrageous screen frame rates then gamers will beat a path to your door. Better talk to Valveand EA.
I was working at a start-up in Austin (MediaPrise) that was purporting to do this same thing – edit photos, videos, and other advertising productions completely over the web. It was a GREAT idea (I was working in the ad business at the time). The issue was software applications like Photoshop, InDesign, etc. that would run in real-time over the web to any user allowed to modify particular files. The main thing was file size. There wasn’t near enough bandwidth for more than the simplest Jpg. But that’s changed –
It’s closer than ever – with Adobe moving their apps to the cloud it will be much easier to do this. BUT – it’s about licensing and we know how THAT goes….
Nikola, thanks for responding to the comments here. It’s great to see answers right from the proverbial horses mouth!
By the way, I’ve used remote desktop pretty heavily, several different systems (VNC, Windows native, LogMeIn, etc.). The Windows remote desktop is by far the fastest since they can take advantage of various tricks with local processing since they control both sides of the equation. With a fast connection and the sub 20ms ping time to my office, it is barely noticeable. If your technology can approach that, it will work great for many applications.
Are you using some special hardware accelerated solution for video compression?
Great application of imaginative thinking. It’s about time someone reinvigorates the boring cloud and even the computing industry as a whole.
Rich Media v. Content
Which will imply the same duality if thin client v. workstation. If we are held down by the capacity of our local interface, then we will be trapped in a rich-thick client. But I believe that the frameworks are here for such tools to evolve. I might be wrong, but for every issue addressed above there will be a solution.
Wow. If companies that sell expensive software, think parametric design or FEM, make their stuff available for rental, this could add capability for small design shops that can’t justify big capital spending for programs that are infrequently needed. This could also be a much better sales tool for pricy specialized software than crippled 30 day free trials.
Would like to try this out. Any information available on pricing plans?
This seems like something Chromecast could be a client for.. if you connected and fed back mouse and keyboard events.
VirtualBox and other Virtual Machine systems allow you to have it output to a virtual screen.. at present I think it’s aimed at VNC protocols but I doubt it would be much work to have it use the graphics chip to encode to H.264 for the chromecast…
I found this: “All Kepler GPUs also incorporate a new hardware-based H.264 video encoder, NVENC.” with suggestions that the video card could now do H.264 encoding in real time on its own as of 2012.
“8x real-time 1080p encoding” on GTX 680
I also found references to the OnLive cloud based gaming company that made headlines with their announcement a while ago. The difference between games and applications is significant though as people who have tried encoding desktop using h.264 video compression weren’t impressed with the results.. good for games but not for applications. Of course, fine tuning the h.264 settings should affect this ( or trick it somehow.. like encoding at 4x resolution then scaling down to encourage a crisper picture ).
Mainframe2 ( I love the name by the way… back to the future ) will provide the high end to corporate with support to large businesses and maybe drm etc.. The “good enough” solutions using VNC and h.264 variations will be sufficient for most ( specially given that the main issues are networking related ).
The idea of renting Photoshop appeals to me. Adobe have simply alienated too many potential purchases with their silly pricing. For those who need to use it now and then there isn’t even a light version that’s any good.
.
For that reason I used to use Paint Shop Pro but had a look at one of their latest versions and it just irritated me. They’d put this layer of uselessness between you and the image editing tools.
.
The alternative was of course to use the free image editors such as GIMP, which is now powerful and, more importantly, stable.
Interesting. Never bet against bandwidth. Renting less often used software is an interesting proposition.
I was more excited when I thought this could be an app hosted in-house…on, say, the ubiquitous Dell 720.
I just cannot get my mind around the Internet not choking this thing.
Also, soon every productive workstation will have i7 with 8-16GB. How much faster can their servers be, while hosting 4,999 other clients besides me?
I would be interested in beta testing your service. I am primarily interested in video editing using something similar to Final Cut Pro (FCP, as far as I know, only runs on Mac).
…or can you handle OSX software, too?
Nikola and Serbian roots? That’s a recipe for something 😉
BTW, they signed me up for a beta account in a about 3 hours, but the fact that I am a paying Citrix customer (and live in Bob’s old home county) may have helped.
Thanks Bob for bringing this to my attention and Nikola for setting me up.
Been playing with the product since yesterday (Windows 7, Mac 10.8 and Ubuntu 13.10) and other than the lag from being 2000 miles away, I think it might be brilliant. Citrix has a problem if Nikola and crew price this right.
I can only assume they have all the legal issues sorted out.
Donald, thanks so much for taking time to test.
.
To all others requesting access or wondered about technology — mention Bob’s blog in email to beta@mainframe2.com and we’ll set you up with access.
.
@Howard Lee Harkness: No OSX apps for now.
.
@Gymbo: Cloud servers are indeed *very* powerful. They are also elastic.
.
@JJones You are right — NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD now all have very efficient H.264 encoders that can do multiple real-time 1080p encodings per server. They are implemented in silicon so you get them for free.
This reminds me of Invincea’s virtual desktop environments.
https://www.invincea.com/product-suite/enterprise-edition/virtual-desktop-environments/
Perhaps Mainframe2 should also have a security-focused product package (e.g. Why take the risk of MS-Office on your computer? Run high-risk programs on a VM that’s FAST. Call today!).
[…] computers, though a second trend will substantially prove them. That trend is exemplified by a Mainframe2 column we wrote a few weeks ago. Apps requiring a lot of estimate energy are starting to quit to a cloud […]
Google
Just beneath, are many completely not associated internet sites to ours, however, they’re surely really worth going over.