Public cloud computing vendors are offloading "commodity" IT functionality to large multi-tenant data centers. How can these vendors differentiate themselves, and what should you look for in a cloud service.
Cloud Computing
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The Wisdom of Clouds
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Five competitive differentiators for cloud services
16 Nov 2009 | 12:43 pm -
IBM launches development and test cloud
4 Nov 2009 | 11:45 pmIBM is launching a development and test cloud service as a part of its Smart Business portfolio, as well as adding private cloud services to Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing portfolio. -
Does cloud computing need malpractice safeguards?
1 Nov 2009 | 6:00 amWith the value of consumer's online information increasing every year, do the old "you can't blame us" mentality of software and Internet-based services have to go? -
Mitosis in action: Cloud computing and 'The Cloud'
27 Oct 2009 | 2:23 pmMuch of the confusion behind the question "what is cloud computing" has to do with the diverging concepts of "cloud computing" and "The Cloud"--an unfortunate but understandable evolution of terminology. -
Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 5
19 Oct 2009 | 1:16 pmThere are tremendous technical and market pressures toward "downsizing" the traditional server operating system and "virtual machine." What does that portend for the future of computing and IT as a profession?
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Sustainable Global Clouds
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Riverbed buys competitor Expand Networks
17 Nov 2009 | 11:57 amBoth companies have technology to speed the transmission of data across wide area networks (WAN). Riverbed is publicly-owned, led by CEO Jerry Kennelly, and on a roll with its Steelhead WAN optimising appliance. It earned $102m in its third 2009 quarter, a 12 per cent increase on the second quarter and 18 per cent up [...] -
RightScale to support Microsoft Azure!
17 Nov 2009 | 11:47 amMICROSOFT PDC09, LOS ANGELES – Nov. 17, 2009 – RightScale®, Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, today announced planned support for the Windows Azure platform. This support will enable customers to deploy RightScale-managed applications to Windows Azure and take advantage of the unique properties offered by the Windows Azure platform. RightScale’s intent to [...] -
Storage vendors beware: Meet the biggest DRAM Flash storage on the planet!
16 Nov 2009 | 2:29 pmThe revolution has started and spinning disks will die. As large storage vendors will clamor for space and try to retain the existing customers, these customers would have kicked every spinning disk out of the data center. As Cloud comes along, we’ll have all those flash and stuff going into the large data centers. [...] -
CapGemini about to lose a €230 Million contract; Unstable Data Center the main reason!
16 Nov 2009 | 7:34 amUnstable Data Center was the main cause for this possible reversal of the large contract. Before anyone jumps to conclusion I must say this at the defense of all large outsourcing parties that these are truly difficult times. We really need to hire quality staff very soon. Large outsourcing firms have double challenges when they [...] -
Cloud Computing Survey: IT shops don’t want to buys servers anymore!
15 Nov 2009 | 11:14 amThis is very consistent with my experience with many customers lately I am talking to directly where IT managers and even system engineers are happy to have the stuff consolidated and have it shipped and packing to some cool managed sourcing party like Rackspace or Amazon. Of the IT shops that LoudHouse chatted up, 51 per [...]
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CloudAve
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Mozilla Is Too Big To Fail
20 Nov 2009 | 11:03 amLarry Dignan at ZDNetmakes an important point about the financial future of Mozilla Foundation. In his post, he points to Mozilla's over reliance on Google and wonders if it is good for its future. The financial for 2008 didn't show any downward trend. Rather, they showed a consolidated revenue of $78.6 million, up 5 percent from 2007. So, why is Larry worried about it then? His reason is summarized in the following sentenceThe worry: Google, now a competitor, is still bankrolling Mozilla.Yes, 90+% of Mozilla's revenues comes from the search engine provider, Google. Anyone who has done Biz… -
Dogbert, the CEO
20 Nov 2009 | 6:31 amCloudAve is exclusively sponsored by -
How to Crash a Party, or Do Not Send a URL and Password Through Twitter
20 Nov 2009 | 6:05 amHey everyone, guess who is having a party at their house! Well everyone in the whole world knows at this point if you have been following people on Twitter. One of the basic rules of social networking is always work to keep yourself safe. If you post a link and a password to a protected page or web site, someone is going to simply follow the process and guess what, you got party crashers. It is not like you could really host all 4000 of your favorite twitter friends at your house, but when you post a URL and password to a protected page on Twitter, someone is going to come along and follow… -
November’s Semantic Web Gang podcast now online
20 Nov 2009 | 5:58 amNovember’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang podcast, which I host, is now online. Standard Podcast [61:45m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | DownloadCloudAve is exclusively sponsored by -
T-Shirt Friday #18 - TelecomONE
20 Nov 2009 | 1:50 amEveryone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series. If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will…
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ElasticVapor - Life in the cloud
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Microsoft to Open Source the .NET Micro Framework
16 Nov 2009 | 1:57 pm(I'm currently in Tokyo, so I'll leave my insights into this news for another time)Today, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, Microsoft announced the release of version 4.0 of the.NET Micro Framework, but also that they are open sourcing the product and making it available under the Apache 2.0 license, which is already being used by the community within the embedded space. The .NET Micro Framework,a development and execution environment for resource-constrained devices, was initially developed inside the Microsoft Startup Business Accelerator, but recently… -
The Future of The Cloud Belongs to Asia
12 Nov 2009 | 6:28 amPeople often ask me where I believe the biggest opportunities for Cloud Computing currently are, at first I thought they were asking about the technical particulars like public clouds, platforms etc, but recently I've come to realize it isn't so much the technology as much as where the technology is being adopted that is important. Really what they're asking me is where is the money? I'm here today to tell you, it's in Asia.One of the more interesting side effects of creating the CloudCamp series of events around the globe has been as a market research vehicle. As interest in Cloud Computing… -
Enomaly ECP 3.0.3 Service Provider Edition Released
9 Nov 2009 | 3:54 pmEnomaly is proud to announce the general availability of The Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) Service Provider Edition 3.0.3.ECP is a carrier-class architecture & cloud hosting platform which supports the deployment of very large public cloud infrastructure for service providers. The platform has been designed to span multiple federated data centers in disparate geographies around the globe handling hundreds of thousands of VM's and multi-tenant customers.This version of ECP Service Provider Edition brings the follow enhancements over 3.0.2:- KVM is now directly supported as a… -
Cloud, The New Taste of the Internet
8 Nov 2009 | 1:43 pmLately there seems to be a minor debate among the clouderati about the semantic differences between the term "the cloud" versus the use of "cloud computing". So I thought I'd jump into the fray.As someone who spends his days eating, breathing and sometimes drinking cloud computing, it's fun to see how the debate has recently devolved into a debate purely focused upon the finer semantic nuances of the various terminologies. The debate seems to generally focus on the varied usages within the companies that are attempting to "cloud-ify" themselves & their products/services. This… -
The Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) for Collaborative Open Cloud Standards
6 Nov 2009 | 12:10 pmAs part of a new initiative at the Open Web Foundation -- a group dedicated to the creation of community-driven specifications & standards. David Rudin along with several other individuals & organizations have crafted a new simple and easy to understand Open Web Foundation agreement (OWFa) targeting collaborative specification development and publishing. You can think of OWFa as similar to the Creative Commons license. But unlike the a CC license the OWFa was developed with the specific needs of spec & standards developers covering aspects such as patents, copyright/trademarks and…
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IT Management and Cloud Blog
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DevopsDays 09 Interview with Kris Buytaert
15 Nov 2009 | 2:53 pm -
BotchagalupeMarks for November 13th - 11:23
13 Nov 2009 | 9:00 pmThese are my links for November 13th from 11:23 to 12:21: Application Lifecycle in the Cloud - Thinking Out Cloud - Cloud computing is having a profound effect on the software application lifecycle. www.devco.net - As part of deploying MCollective + ActiveMQ instead of my old Spread based system I need to figure out a multi location setup, the documentation says I'd possible so I thought I better get down and figure it out. In my case I will have per-country ActiveMQ's, I've had the same with Spread in the past and it's proven reliable enough for my needs, each ActiveMQ will… -
NoSQLEast 09 Keynote
12 Nov 2009 | 9:11 amFor more NOSQLEast Videos follow this link… -
Devopsdays 09 - Automated Deployment With Chris Read of ThoughtWorks
12 Nov 2009 | 3:29 am -
BotchagalupeMarks for November 13th - 03:21
29 Nov 1999 | 4:00 pmThese are my links for November 13th from 03:21 to 09:40: dev2ops: delivering application change - The non-functional requirements become late cycle "peek-a-boo" requirements when they aren't addressed early in development. Late cycle requirements violates continuous integration and agile development principles. The production tooling and requirements have to be accounted for in the development environment but most enterprises don't do that. Amazon Bids For Windows Developers On Eve Of Azure’s Launch - Plug Into The Cloud - InformationWeek - Four days before Microsoft…
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Software as Services
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Can the Economist entirely be trusted?
15 Nov 2009 | 3:16 pmI think a publication with the renowned integrity and impartiality of The Economist would have the sense to put its hand on its heart and say, ‘We try our best and we’re the best there is, but no, you can’t entirely trust any source.’ But if it were put in a position of asserting its trustworthiness against alternative publications it would surely have no choice but to speak out with a resounding voice in its own favor. Thus I ask all my readers to vote a resounding ‘no’ to the proposition in the current Economist Debate, “This house believes that the… -
Microsoft cuts BPOS price to squeeze Lotus
5 Nov 2009 | 2:13 amWhile most observers portray Microsoft’s sortie into online email and collaboration services as a titanic battle to keep Google off its productivity applications turf, the real target of this week’s price reductions is IBM’s Lotus unit. In a briefing earlier this week, Ron Markezich, corporate VP, Microsoft Online Services told me that most of his team’s customer wins are at the expense of the IBM division: “Seventy-five percent of our enterprise customers are coming from a non-Microsoft platform — predominantly [Lotus] Notes.” The half-price reduction… -
Cloud cuts everyone's cost of ownership
29 Oct 2009 | 8:14 pmSpeaking in the opening keynote of SIIA OnDemand in San Jose this morning, SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard let slip a statistic that set several attendees a-twittering. He revealed that the SaaS provider’s multi-tenant application infrastructure supports its 2,850+ customers and 5.4+ million users on just 150 servers. The ability to achieve such enormous economies of scale demonstrates the huge power of multi-tenancy and gives the lie to the line, so often peddled by the conventional on-premise software vendors, that SaaS is just a delivery option. SuccessFactors would not be able to… -
Box.net wants to be the Switzerland of data
22 Oct 2009 | 6:41 amToday, online file storage and collaboration provider Box.net launches integration with Salesforce.com. As TechCrunch explains: “… businesses will be able to add a Box.net app to their Salesforce accounts, allowing them to quickly access their documents, media, and other files from directly within their CRM … businesses need to sign up for Box.net’s enterprise plan, which includes free access to the Salesforce app. As an added bonus, any businesses using the new Salesforce integration will be eligible for unlimited storage on Box.net …” The move is a first… -
What EuroCloud means for SaaS in Europe
20 Oct 2009 | 4:14 amToday EuroCloud, a new industry organization that aims to promote cloud and SaaS, launches in seven European countries. I’m involved in the initiative, having agreed to act as UK co-ordinator for the launch. Other groups are launching in France, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain, and the launch has the backing of almost thirty SaaS and cloud vendors, ranging from giants like Amazon, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and McAfee to up-and-coming local players including Huddle, INES, Mimecast, NTRGlobal and Twinfield. Full details are on the website and in the launch press release…
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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog
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The Singularity University fight cheer
12 Nov 2009 | 5:17 amSingularity University appears to be in full swing now, which is a great comfort to me. Already I feel much less fearful about being turned into a sex slave for a gang of immeasurably brainy robots. Ted Greenwald, from Wired's Epicenter blog, has been hanging out at the Sing U campus - it feels, he says, like "a top-secret installation out of a James Bond movie, crowned with strange domed buildings and adorned by sculptures of airships" - and auditing some classes. You can find a rundown of his reports here. It bothers me, though, that Sing U doesn't appear... -
Does my tweet look fat?
10 Nov 2009 | 7:56 amAs the velocity of communication approaches realtime, language compresses. Think about it. When people originally started talking about Twitter, the first thing they'd always mention was the 140-character limit that the service imposes on tweets. So short! Who can say anything in 140 lousy characters? Crazy! And it's true that when a person who is used to longer forms of writing starts emitting tweets, keeping to just 140 characters can be a challenge. You actually have to think a bit about how to squeeze your thoughts to fit the format. It doesn't take long, though, for a twitterer to… -
Be everywhere now
9 Nov 2009 | 9:19 amThe BBC has recently featured two thoughtful takes on how the Net is altering people's experience of popular music. What's particularly interesting (to me, anyway) is how the two articles examine the same phenomenon - the ability to listen to pretty much anything that's ever been recorded, immediately and for free - but see very different consequences. In an article that appeared a week or so ago, John Harris proclaimed a new "golden age of infinite music." And he made a compelling case: I [recently] had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my... -
The informavore in its cage
6 Nov 2009 | 6:35 amEdge is featuring, in "The Age of the Informavore," a fascinating interview with Frank Schirrmacher, the influential science and culture editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung."The question I am asking myself," Schirrmacher says, "[which] arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, [is] how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life ... And you encounter this not only in a… -
Atmospherics
30 Oct 2009 | 11:42 amGoogle held a one-day conference on cloud computing in London last week, called Atmosphere, and they asked me to give a talk on the historical and economic context of the development of the cloud. All the presentations from the event are now up on YouTube, including mine, which if you have a half hour to kill you can watch here: The other presenters included Werner Vogels, Marc Benioff, Geoffrey Moore, and various Googlers and their clients....
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TechCrunchIT
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Cisco Lets You Access Network Security Information On The Go Via iPhone App
19 Nov 2009 | 9:00 pmFor security nuts and enterprise clients, Cisco is launching an iPhone app, called Cisco SIO, to put Cisco Security Intelligence Operations in users’ hands. The app gives giving users real-time access to security information and also lets users create personalized alerts to show security threats that could impact their network. Powered by the Cisco's Security IntelliShield Alert Manager Service, the app informs, protects and enables IT staff to respond in real time to alerts and threats to the network. The application will deliver data on early warning intelligence, threat vulnerabilities… -
Silverlight 4 In Beta. Supports Google Chrome. (Plus, Screenshots of Facebook Desktop App).
18 Nov 2009 | 4:21 pmMicrosoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4 in beta at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) today. Some of the new features include more fluid animations, Webcam, microphone and printing support, 200 percent faster start times than Silverlight 3, deep zoom and multi-touch support and more. It now also supports Google Chrome, even though it's just a rounding error of a browser. One of the big capabilities of Silverlight 4 is its ability to take rich-media experiences outside the browser in client apps which will compete with Adobe AIR. The non-browser apps fully support HTML,… -
Salesforce Chatter: A Real-Time Social Network For The Enterprise
18 Nov 2009 | 9:29 amWe're here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the… -
Email Archiving In The Cloud
17 Nov 2009 | 4:45 pmThinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, a SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology–offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email. A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their… -
Google Sites Become Prettier With Templates
17 Nov 2009 | 11:03 amGoogle Sites, which launched a little under two years ago, have given businesses and consumers a way to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required, making it relatively easy for anyone without a technical background to build a simple website. Now, Google is making it infinitely easier for anyone to create sleek, attractive websites with new feature Templates. For those that aren't familiar with this product, Sites is the reincarnation of Jotspot, which Google acquired back in 2006 (though the two products look totally different). The product is Google's easy-to-use…
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All Things Distributed
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82 Billion Objects in Amazon S3
9 Nov 2009 | 5:27 pmAt the end of Q3 2009 we counted over 82 billion objects in Amazon S3. Congrats to the team for providing such a rock solid service! When looking at the graph keep in mind that the first 4 markers are a year apart, but the last one only 6 months. -
Expanding the Cloud: The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
27 Oct 2009 | 12:00 amToday marks the launch of Amazon RDS - the Amazon Relational Database Service. Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS handles all the "muck" of relational database management freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business. Fine Tuning Data Management At Amazon we have a long history of fine tuning our data management solutions to make sure that our systems can be reliable and cost-effective as we continue to scale. Almost from the beginning of operating the Amazon ecommerce platform it was… -
Expanding the Cloud: Amazon Web Services to support the Federal Government
15 Sep 2009 | 10:01 amIn the past week both Vivek Kundra, the U.S. CIO, and Casey Coleman, the CIO of the GSA, have made very strong statements in supporting the use of cloud computing to power Federal programs. A good example is today's announcement about apps.gov. In conversations with Vivek and Casey, I am struck every time by how much their observations that Federal CIOs are focused too much on infrastructure issues are similar to the observations within Amazon a number of years ago that motivated us to develop the AWS Infrastructure services. At that time, Amazon engineering teams focused more than 70% of… -
Seamlessly Extending the Data Center - Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
25 Aug 2009 | 11:00 pmAt this 3rd anniversary of the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), it is amazing to see the impact this service has had on the industry. It is truly disruptive technology and its impact has reached far beyond a pure technology offering as the benefits of the cloud have changed the way we view IT Infrastructure. As one of the CIOs at the ACM Cloud Computing Roundtable summarized it: "IT used to be the blocker in anything we did, but with our shift to the cloud IT is now the enabler." From young businesses and established enterprises to hospitals and governments agencies, all… -
Feedback for Amazon Web Services
13 Aug 2009 | 3:43 pmIngrained in the DNA of the Amazon Technologist is a single-minded focus on the needs of our customers. The Amazon development process is even called "Working from the customer backwards". Essential in this process is a good understanding of what the customers need in terms of new services, new features for existing services, or different approaches to things that we are already doing. We collect this feedback continuously from various sources: the AWS forums, the AWS Premium Support Team, Amazonians on the road talking to customers, solution architects helping to define customer…
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Cloud Musings by Kevin L. Jackson
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“Cloud” Shows Promise during Navy Trident Warrior
17 Nov 2009 | 9:07 amLast month as part of the Navy’s annual Trident Warrior exercise, Dataline, LLC successfully demonstrated that a standard shipboard communications infrastructure could be used to manage a commercial cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. Presented during the fall Trident Warrior ’10 (TW ’10) lab period, Dataline’s Secure Cloud Computing experiment used a simulated shipboard infrastructure to demonstrate secure access to selected collaboration and geospatial information service (GIS) applications.The purpose was to validate the ability of a commercial Infrastructure as a… -
Government Cloud Computing Value Survey
15 Nov 2009 | 12:23 pmAs part of a continuing Government Cloud computing education program, Dataline, LLC has released a Government Cloud Computing Value Survey. This online resource has been designed as an aid to help Federal agencies explore the value of cloud computing. Through a 15 minute interactive session, this survey will:Provide a high level cloud computing tutorial;Explain the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative;Give an overview of Apps.gov cloud computing solutions; andPresent possible cloud computing business value statements.Referencing a recent Booz Allen Hamilton cloud computing economic analysis,… -
"Hyper-Standardized" Cloud Computing Environment a Plus for DISA
9 Nov 2009 | 11:00 amHenry Sienkiewcz, DISA Computer Services Technical Director, credits the cloud computing "hyper-standardized" environment for the improvement they have been able to deliver through their cloud computing initiative. During remarks at this week's Federal Executive Forum taping, he specified faster service delivery, higher quality, lower cost and increased security as important cloud computing benefits.Joining him on the program was:Robert Carey - Navy Chief Information Officer; andMike Krieger- Army Deputy Chief Information Officer, Office of the Secretary of the ArmyThe panel discussed the… -
Army Deputy CIO Cites Army/DISA Cloud Computing Partnership
8 Nov 2009 | 2:36 pmThis week's Federal Executive Forum taping highlighted collaboration between DISA and the Army on the service's transition to cloud computing. Army Deputy Chief Information Officer Mike Krieger called it a partnership, important to the support of Department of Defense Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) activities.Joining him on the program was:Robert Carey - Navy Chief Information Officer; andHenry Sienkiewcz- Technical Program Director, Computer Services, Defense Information Systems AgencyThe panel discussed the progress of Cloud Computing in the Federal Government, best practices including… -
Navy CIO Discusses Cloud Computing
6 Nov 2009 | 4:00 amDuring this week's Federal Executive Forum taping, Navy CIO Robert Carey discussed his views on cloud computing. Stating that the NGEN and CANES (Navy Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services) programs will both leverage cloud computing, he also describes a future of "grey clouds" on each ship.Joining him on the program was:Mike Krieger- Army Deputy Chief Information Officer, Office of the Secretary of the ArmyHenry Sienkiewcz- Technical Program Director, Computer Services, Defense Information Systems Agency The panel discussed the progress of Cloud Computing in the Federal…
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ARCHIMEDIUS
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IT’s Groovy Time Flashback
16 Nov 2009 | 2:00 pmAs virtualization-lite creates swarms of increasingly dense VLANs in the data center, the IT industry appears to be responding by consolidating into coalitions, including Arcadia (EMC, VMW, and CSCO); HP/COMS; and IBM/JNPR. Each coalition will likely produce its own “branded container” dedicated to the simplification and tactical orchestration of growing VLAN empires. This consolidation takes us [...] -
The Real Time Infrastructure Ultimatum
5 Nov 2009 | 4:27 pmFor months the infrastructure 2.0 blog has talked about the automation of IT from a network perspective, including the automation of the network itself. While few may question the need for network automation most businesses today still run their networks like they ran their “supply chains” decades ago, before the network. This great irony is about [...] -
IT Innovation will Require Network Innovation
22 Oct 2009 | 4:31 pmA recent article by Larry Dignan about how IT has fallen behind the Tech Curve laments how slow and cumbersome enterprise IT has become relative to consumerized technologies. Larry covered a session at the recent Gartner Symposium and was advised by Gartner analysts that IT pros want the world to proceed in an orderly fashion [...] -
Changing Horses in the Cloud
13 Oct 2009 | 2:14 pmAs infrastructure 2.0 is turned on it will represent an irreversible transformation in the way IT services are delivered. The timing of product releases, investments and deployments could make all the difference for a range of companies and organizations. Those who could be impacted include the cloud vendors (including Google, Amazon, Rackspace and Savvis), the virtualization [...] -
Ready for Just in Time IT?
30 Sep 2009 | 4:11 pmIn a matter of decades we watched the data network eliminate “middlemen” and arcane practices that had been around for centuries, only to see these practices re-emerge at the core of the network. Understanding this irony is pivotal to understanding what is about to take place within the network and its effect on the evolution [...]
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Fountainhead
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Infrastructure Virtualization: The Next Logical Step
19 Nov 2009 | 12:49 pm2010 will be an interesting year for virtualization - but not from the perspective you're probably thinking. It will be the year of the virtual infrastructure, not of the virtual machine. Yes, the O/S virtualization market is maturing as it transforms how servers and applications are managed. The major vendors all offer hypervisors and management to accomplish server consolidation, live migration, HA, lifecycle management, lab management, and more. And they're even offering higher-level tools for DR and cloud computing... Read more on VMBlog.com -
Infrastructure 2.0 – A Virtual Analogy
27 Oct 2009 | 11:09 pmIs OS virtualization an end in itself? Is it both necessary and sufficient for all things Cloud and IaaS? Is it the panacea IT Operations has been looking for? From where I see it, abstracting the OS is certainly a great start, but it’s actually only 50% of the goal. To a degree, OS virtualization is the “shiny metal object” de jure in that it’s captivating everyone’s attention. It is of course very valuable, and is causing an important inflection point in datacenter operations and economics. But there is a less-visible, less sexy side to datacenter operations and economics that… -
Differing Target Uses for IT Automation Types
6 Oct 2009 | 8:30 amOne of the most oft-repeated themes at this year's VMworld was that of "automation." Everybody claimed they had it, but on closer investigation it had any number of poorly-defined meanings.A specific angle I want to address here is that of infrastructure automation; that is, the dynamic manipulation of physical resources (virtualized or not) such as I/O, networking, load balancing, and storage connections - Sometimes referred to as "Infrastructure 2.0". Why is this important? Although automation of software (such as provisioning & manipulation of VMs/applications) usually captures… -
A real-world cloud user shares his findings
29 Sep 2009 | 3:47 pmI subscribe to a number of mailing lists from my alma mater. A few weeks ago, an alum "John" posted a request for recommendations for a cloud computing vendor for his small investment firm. What follows is his email to the group following responses he received.This is an incredibly illustrative peek inside of the "real world" of cloud computing, and what prospective SMB users are looking for and concerned about. As well as what's "Good Enough". I've not edited anything....I had many requests to share our findings so I figured I would share with the group. I appreciate all of the input I… -
Alternative Recommendation for DCeP "Service Productivity"
22 Sep 2009 | 2:38 pmBack in February of this year, The Green Grid published a paper listing proposed Proxy measures for data center productivity, specifically Data Center Energy Productivity (DCeP).This paper followed a much earlier output from the group in 2007 - which helped define the now much-used PUE and DCiE metrics which I wrote about back then. Those metrics were (and are) nice if what you care about are "basic" efficiencies of a data center -- simply how much power is getting to your servers relative to all of the other power being consumed by infrastructure systems (e.g. lighting, power distribution,…
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SmoothSpan Blog
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Why Process Barfs on Social
9 Nov 2009 | 8:06 amSameer Patel has an intriguing new post on the problems of E2.0 and its juxtapositioning versus Business Process. I wanted to comment, since Helpstream’s main claim to fame is the harmonious integration of Social and Business Process. That’s not the only thing we do, but it is pretty unique as Sameer’s post points out. Process barfs on Social because most Business Process isn’t integrated with Social. E2.0’s biggest problem is it lacks Business Process for the most part. Too often it does get thrown out as the silver bullet. Process insists on… -
Podcast: From Soviet Era CRM Command and Control to Social CRM
20 Oct 2009 | 7:43 amI recently did a couple of podcasts with Phil Wainewright to talk about the evolution of CRM from its original command and control origins to the Social CRM that companies like Helpstream are delivering today. I have to say it was a lot of fun working with Phil on the podcast. I’ve also got another one coming with Brent Leary. To hear (or read) the 2 ‘casts with Phil, try these links: - From Soviet-Era CRM to the Social Fabric of the Web - Bringing the Service Ethos to Sales and Marketing Enjoy! -
The Experience Portfolio: Thinking about Customer Experience Strategy
12 Sep 2009 | 12:56 pmRecently I was talking with Paul Greenberg and he presented me with a particularly elegant concept that he called the “Experience Portfolio.” He was talking about the collection of factors that influence the overall customer reaction to the transaction they’re consumating with a vendor. The Experience Portfolio consists of products, services, experiences and tools. He talks about the balance between these components in a recent blog post and asks some interesting questions: How do you think about this when you are developing your Social CRM strategy? Do you break out… -
The Customer, as Social CRM, is the Fourth Pillar of CRM
9 Sep 2009 | 8:03 amA collection of excellent blog posts from the Social CRM community are converging on what I think is the real secret of what Social CRM is all about. There has been much talk about the “Pillars of CRM”. Traditionally we have Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service as the three pillars of CRM. Clearly the world has changed. I talk at some length about how in the first of a series of blog posts we’ve taken to calling Helpstream’s “Social CRM Manifesto“. Give that article a read for a good introduction to how the Customer has come to be in Control, a… -
What do Customers Want, and How Can Social Media Help?
3 Sep 2009 | 7:55 amThe Twitter #scrm group is a wonderful place to pick up new threads around the whole Social CRM movement. But as I’ve remarked before, it is so tough to wring a conversation out of Twitter’s fabric (this is a problem for Twitter, not those valiantly trying to have the conversation), that I generally watch without trying to join in. Recently, there has been a great back and forth on customer loyalty. Does it exist anymore? Don’t people just buy on price? Can Social Media affect loyalty? What had been troubling me about the discussion was its fairly one dimensional…
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CLOUD COMPUTING NEWS - Google News
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The Lanier Law Firm Announces Settlement, Judgment in Cloud Computing Patent ... - PR Newswire (press release)
20 Nov 2009 | 9:45 amThe Lanier Law Firm Announces Settlement, Judgment in Cloud Computing Patent PR Newswire (press release) lawsuit over cloud storage and cloud computing technology that allows individuals to access computer applications through Internet browsers. and more » -
Choose your route to cloud computing - ComputerWeekly.com
20 Nov 2009 | 8:48 amThe AgeChoose your route to cloud computingComputerWeekly.comAzure is compelling for users happy with Windows, but who want the option to use cloud-based services. Chrome OS is an operating system for cloud computing. Ozzie, Muglia and the Microsoft cloudSDTimes.comIs Integration Key to Microsoft's Success in the Cloud?IT Business EdgeFuture bright for Microsoft cloud computing, server president saysistockAnalyst.com (press release)FierceCIO -EDL Consulting -The Associated Pressall 544 news articles » -
Report: How risky is cloud computing? - CNET News
20 Nov 2009 | 8:15 amSYS-CON Media (press release)Report: How risky is cloud computing?CNET NewsCloud computing is luring more businesses with its promise of minimal maintenance and low costs. But are companies putting their data at Cloud computing poses 'several' risksPublic ServiceSecurity still an issue for cloud computing, says reportComputingNew Approach Needed to Cloud SecuritySYS-CON Media (press release)V3.co.uk -ComputerWeekly.com -IT PROall 27 news articles » -
Could Cloud Computing Hurt Outsourcers? - BusinessWeek
20 Nov 2009 | 6:52 amCould Cloud Computing Hurt Outsourcers?BusinessWeekCould some of the big names in outsourcing be among the victims of the much-hyped shift to cloud computing? As businesses begin to host their and more » -
Google Chrome OS Ushers in New Era of Cloud Computing - eWeek
20 Nov 2009 | 4:57 amTelegraph.co.ukGoogle Chrome OS Ushers in New Era of Cloud ComputingeWeekTo do this, the Chrome OS team has bypassed many of the computing processes associated with traditional operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, Google's Chrome OS software gives glimpse of simplified computingTimes Online'We are changing the game in terms of end-to-end user experience'Economic TimesWhy Google Should Cool It With Chrome OSWired NewsTelegraph.co.uk -ComputerWeekly.com -StrategyEye (subscription)all 1,016 news articles »
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Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal
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Down-to-Earth Contracts that Keep the Cloud Aloft
20 Nov 2009 | 1:38 pmThis article looks at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting parties in a Cloud environment. Many standards already developed for Web services and service-oriented architectures provide to the communicating parties a good understanding and control of the expected quality of service at the most basic level of the interaction.read more -
IBM Offers a Little Blue Insight
20 Nov 2009 | 1:15 pmIn the interest of selling more widgetry to more people, IBM has transformed one of its mainframes into what it calls Blue Insight, a private cloud packed initially with a petabyte of structured and unstructured data that 200,000 of its sales, product development and manufacturing people can access to make a sale.read more -
RightScale To Support Azure
20 Nov 2009 | 12:45 pmRightScale, the cloud manager, plans to support Windows Azure and let customers deploy RightScale-managed applications and take advantage of Azure’s particular properties. It said it would support Azure infrastructure-level services through its new Service Management API like it does Amazon and Rackspace and give Azure users access to other cloud platforms. It didn’t say when.read more -
Intel Invests in Joyent’s Cloud
20 Nov 2009 | 12:45 pmJoyent, whose customers include ABC Disney, CNN, The Gap, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo, developed its own custom OS and data center virtualization technology, which creates a multi-tenant cloud. It’s supposed to deliver more than 70% utilization, which is eight times more than industry averages according to Gartner. read more -
NTT Uses OpSource to Compete with AT&T’s Cloud
20 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pmWhen Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the world’s biggest telco, took a piece of the $10 million E series funding going into OpSource earlier this year, the pair reportedly didn’t know they would be going into the cloud business together – or that it would be on the same day that AT&T told people to stand by because it was about to launch an Infrastructure-as-a-Service that looks a lot like Amazon.read more
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CLOUD COMPUTING blogs - Google News
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Cisco Throws More Money at Tandberg - SYS-CON Media (press release)
20 Nov 2009 | 11:04 amSYS-CON Media (press release)Cisco Throws More Money at TandbergSYS-CON Media (press release)Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. and more » -
Report: How risky is cloud computing? - CNET News
20 Nov 2009 | 8:15 amSYS-CON Media (press release)Report: How risky is cloud computing?CNET NewsLance is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and he is not an employee of CNET. by bwinski November 20, 2009 8:35 AM PST Cloud computing and outsourcing of EU security agency highlights cloud computing risksInfoWorldall 27 news articles » -
Google opens its cloud-based OS for developers - MediaMughals
20 Nov 2009 | 2:28 amTelegraph.co.ukGoogle opens its cloud-based OS for developersMediaMughalsBeing a pure cloud-computing based application, Chrome OS will be offering the web applications, with no conventional desktop applications. Five Reasons the Google Chrome OS will FlopPC WorldGoogle Chrome OS DetailedIGNGoogle Chrome OS unveiledWhich?Search Engine Land (blog) -CNN -Linux Magazine (registration) (blog)all 1,014 news articles » -
The King of the Cloud - BusinessWeek
19 Nov 2009 | 2:13 pmBusinessWeekThe King of the CloudBusinessWeekIn cloud computing, client feedback is vital. One of Salesforce.com's most effective means of getting it is Play #61: Harness Customers' Ideas. and more » -
Guest blog: Navy demonstrates value of military cloud computing during recent ... - PennWell BtoB Industry Blogs (blog)
19 Nov 2009 | 10:46 amGuest blog: Navy demonstrates value of military cloud computing during recent PennWell BtoB Industry Blogs (blog)Presented during the fall Trident Warrior '10 (TW '10) lab period, Dataline's secure cloud computing experiment used a simulated shipboard infrastructure to
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GoGrid Blog
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Come Hear David Weekly (PBWorks/Hacker Dojo) at StartUp SF on December 2nd
19 Nov 2009 | 2:17 pmI’m pleased to announce that we have a new StartUp SF (version 2.2) coming on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009. This event is just around the corner (I’m just so “good” about planning in advance) so be sure that you register now and share this event with your friends and co-workers. For your learning pleasure, we have none other than David Weekly, founder of PBWorks (”online collaboration that just works” – formerly PBWiki) and Founding Director of Hacker Dojo (a community center for hackers & thinkers to meet, discuss, learn and create). -
Video: Understanding GoGrid’s November 2009 Product Release
18 Nov 2009 | 6:14 amLast week, I published the November 2009 GoGrid Customer Update newsletter on the GoGrid blog. In it, I highlighted the important changes that were included in the recent deployment of GoGrid, including our new GoGrid CDN, the GoGrid Exchange, new RAM Hour & Bandwidth plans, new Windows Server base images and some other items. To follow up with that newsletter, which was sent to GoGrid customers by Mario Olivarez (VP of Products), I thought that it would be useful for those interested in GoGrid to learn a bit more. So, I spent a few minutes interviewing Mario about these recent changes… -
Rapidly Develop, Test & Deploy Windows Azure Applications using the GoGrid Cloud
17 Nov 2009 | 5:54 amJust in time for the Microsoft PDC 2009, GoGrid is excited to showcase an integrated solution for Windows Azure™ developers, using the GoGrid Cloud for seamlessly building and deploying applications for Windows Azure. Our solution interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure and includes preconfigured development environments which allows developers to build applications and publish them to Windows Azure. GoGrid’s VP of Engineering, Paul Lappas, narrates the video below demonstrating the interoperability between GoGrid Cloud Infrastructure and the Windows Azure Platform:… -
Newsletter: GoGrid Customer Update – November 2009
12 Nov 2009 | 9:45 amA few days ago, the GoGrid newsletter was delivered to our customers. As with the past newsletters, we want to be sure that all interested parties, whether you are a customer or not, are informed of our important updates. We have a wide variety of items that are covered in this November 2009 newsletter so be sure to read on. If you want to get these updates and others regularly, I encourage you to subscribe to the GoGrid RSS feed, follow us on Twitter (@GoGrid) and become a fan of us on the GoGrid Facebook Fanpage. Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (November 2009): Hello Michael, We have… -
GoGrid Announces New Pricing & More Volume Discount Plans
10 Nov 2009 | 1:09 pmLast week, we released a new version of GoGrid which includes new RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans, included larger volume discounts. Further details of this released covered in this post are: New RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans New Linux & Windows Base Images Behind-the-scenes Performance Improvements Read on for more details. New RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans With this release, we are also making some changes (for the better) on our pricing plans. Coupled with this, we have now made it even easier to upgrade (or downgrade) your plans from within the GoGrid portal. These…
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Spouting Shite
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Agile programming rocks! (Codeworks digital bootcamp)
12 Nov 2009 | 2:38 amYesterday I took part in the Codeworks Connect Digital Bootamp. The event was attended by around 80 software, web and games developers. After an excellent introdution from Meri Williams the attendees split into three groups for workshops. Oli Wood from the Bgroup ran the web developers workshop, Chris Hadley from Ubisoft ran the games developers workshop and I ran the software developers workshop. My presentation covered the basics of project management, why Christopher Columbus was a crap project manager, the Waterfall system, the Agile Manifesto and finally an introduction to Extreme… -
antispam and antivirus resellers wanted!
4 Nov 2009 | 4:39 amSince the release of our email spam and virus protection service (emailcloud) in September 2007 we have signed up over 1200 SME’s on the system. Our first 1,000 customers took 23 months to register, but since then sales have been very brisk, for example in October we signed up 138 new clients, that is 6.27 new customers per business day !! These are excellent sales figures, especially when you consider the fact that we do not have a direct sales team or any marketing budget. So, how do we do it? We don’t sell services direct…ever! We only sell our services through a network or… -
Downtime is unacceptable
3 Nov 2009 | 5:23 amDowntime is unacceptable in any market, and especially not in a commoditized market where customers demand a solid user experience. Early adopters and Beta testers deal with buggy code, bad documentation and downtime. Such annoyances are ignored because the advantages of testing a new gadget or being the first in your peer group to try out new technology. But, the same cannot be said for users of business critical commoditized services…such as email. When we decided to release a new business critical service in 2007 we chose to use Cloud Computing providers to help with our infrastructure. -
SuperChristmas
24 Oct 2009 | 3:24 amYes, Christmas is on the way and we are planning a huge party this year! SuperMondays, in partnership with Thursday Fizz, Adesign Association, Refresh Teeside and VBUG are proud to announce: SuperChristmas is the Christmas party that brings our organisations together to round off an excellent year and to set the scene for 2010. The party will start at 7:00pm on Thursday 17th December 2009 atHoults Yard The ticket price includes a light dinner, ceilidh dancing, and as much free beer/wine/soft drinks as the budget will allow…all served in a farm house theme decked out with bales of hay! -
CloudCamp Dublin, presentations
18 Sep 2009 | 3:20 amDave Neilsen (http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloudcamp/2966839755/) Last night I helped organise the first CloudCamp to be held in Dublin, and the 43rd to be held around the world. The event was hosted by Paul Lynch from Hosting365 at their excellent facility at Park West in Dublin. The event had over 70 attendees from a wide variety of backgrounds including startups, large business and education. We were very grateful to Dave Neilsen who travelled over from the US to help run the event. I recorded the various lightning talks and uploaded the video here: Ross Cooney — Bootstrap and…
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Inside Enterprise IT
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A Quick Overview of Azure: What it is/Where its going
19 Nov 2009 | 11:43 amI’m currently in New York visiting customers and attending Interop/Web 2.0. While these two conferences have different session tracks their expos are co-located and attendees of either can visit the whole lot. It was then in the Web 2.0 section earlier today where I met Keith Pijanowski, a Microsoft evangelist for Windows Azure. Keith has been working with Azure the last year and half and telling customers how it can drive down costs and make their software development cycle more agile. I got Keith to take a quick break from booth duty and explain it to me. (I wanted to know what all… -
Talking about Gluster: Clustered Cloud Storage
17 Nov 2009 | 7:39 pmWith today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management. (Please visit the site to view this media) Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle: Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell. Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model… -
Dell Outlines HPC Strategy and Cray Partnership
17 Nov 2009 | 2:12 amPushing the envelope and finding new innovative ways to deliver an HPC (High-Performance Computing) solution is a priority at Dell. Our recent partnership announcement with Cray and Microsoft illustrate how industry leaders are going about making HPC make more accessible, scalable and affordable. The Cray CX1-iWS, available exclusively through Dell, combines Cray’s HPC experience with Dell’s market reach resulting in a desk side “supercomputer” that is easy to configure, deploy, administer and use. Leveraging industry standard components such as Intel Xeon processors,… -
Adam of Oracle talks about Oracle VM and the Cloud
16 Nov 2009 | 1:19 pmA couple of weeks ago on the show floor of Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara I ran into Adam Hawley, Director of product management for Oracle VM. When Adam finished his stint in the Oracle booth he sat down with me to talk about what was going on at Oracle in the world of virtualization and the cloud. (Please visit the site to view this media) Some of the topics Adam tackles: Oracle VM, Oracle’s sever virtualization and management platform, while based on Xen is all Oracle on top of it. The Virtual Iron acquisition which is in the process of being incorporated within the Oracle… -
The Planet, from Hoster to Hoster & Cloud Provider
16 Nov 2009 | 5:13 amAt the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara I was able to grab some time with Rob Walters, director of product management at Houston-based The Planet. Rob, who has an atypical Texas twang, talked to me about how The Planet has been dipping its toe in the cloud waters and how it is soon planning on taking the plunge. (Please visit the site to view this media) Some of the topics Rob tackles: The Planet began its foray into cloud computing over a year ago by partnering with Nirvanix and providing a storage cloud for back-up and archive. They have spent the last 9 months working on a cloud…
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Perspectives
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ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing
20 Nov 2009 | 6:24 amI’m on the program committee for the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing. The conference will be held June 10th and 11th 2010 in Indianapolis Indiana. SOCC brings together database and operating systems researchers and practitioners interested in cloud computing. It is jointly sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) and the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS). The conference will be held in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD in 2010 and with SOSP in 2011 continuing to alternate between SIGMOD and SOSP in subsequent years. Joe Hellerstein… -
Randy Shoup & John Ousterhout at HPTS 2009
14 Nov 2009 | 8:24 amHPTS has always been one of my favorite workshops over the years. Margo Seltzer was the program chair this year and she and the program committee brought together one of the best programs ever. Earlier I posted my notes from Andy Bectolsheim’s session Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009 and his slides Technologies for Data Intensive Computing. Two other sessions were particularly interesting and worth summarizing here. The first is a great talk on high-scale services lessons learned from Randy Shoup and a talk by John Ousterhout on RAMCloud a research project to completely eliminate… -
Technologies for Data Intensive Computing
11 Nov 2009 | 4:45 pmIn an earlier post Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009 I put my notes up on Andy Bechtolsheim's excellent talk at HPTS 2009. His slides from that talk are now available: Technologies for Data Intensive Computing. Strongly recommended. James Hamilton e: jrh@mvdirona.com w: http://www.mvdirona.com b: http://blog.mvdirona.comhttp://perspectives.mvdirona.com From Perspectives. -
Conversation with Butler Lampson at SOSP 2009
7 Nov 2009 | 10:45 amJust about exactly one year ago, I posted a summary and the slides from an excellent Butler Lampson talk: The Uses of Computers: What’s Past is Merely Prologue. Its time for another installment. Butler was at SOSP 2009 a few weeks back and Marvin Theimer caught up with him for a wide ranging discussion on distributed systems. With Butler's permission, what follows are Marvin’s notes from the discussion. Contrast cars with airplanes: when the fancy electronic systems fail you (most-of-the-time) can pull a car over to the side of the road and safely get out whereas an airplane… -
One Size Does Not Fit All
3 Nov 2009 | 6:11 amLast week AWS announced the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and I blogged that it was big step forward for the cloud storage world: Amazon RDS, More Memory, and Lower Prices. This really is an important step forward in that a huge percentage of commercial applications are written to depend upon Relational Databases. But, I was a bit surprised to get a couple of notes asking about the status of Simple DB and whether the new service was a replacement. These questions were perhaps best characterized by the forum thread The End is Nigh for SimpleDB. I can understand why some…
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Virtualization.com
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Release: Univa UniCluster 5.0
19 Nov 2009 | 4:57 pmUniva UD, a provider of cloud management software products, today announced UniCluster 5.0, a major new version of Univa’s infrastructure and workload management software stack that provides the underpinnings of Univa’s cloud computing solutions. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
NextIO to Bring Virtualization Technology To IBM Cluster Solutions
19 Nov 2009 | 4:48 pmNextIO has announced it is working with IBM to offer customers integrated cluster solutions that incorporate NextIO technology, with availability in 2010. The solution will enable reconfigurable and on demand GPU compute capabilities for IBM iDataplex customers. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Release: Elastra Cloud Server (ECS) 2.0 – Enterprise Edition
19 Nov 2009 | 4:45 pmElastra Corporation, a provider of application infrastructure automation software, has announced the immediate availability of Elastra Cloud Server (ECS) 2.0, Enterprise Edition. In this release, ECS lets customers compose, orchestrate and manage systems made up of Oracle databases, WebLogic Application Servers and other Enterprise-grade software as well as open-source applications like MySQL,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Zenoss Launches Version 2.5 Of Enterprise Product
19 Nov 2009 | 4:43 pmZenoss, a commercial open source provider of IT enterprise management products, today announced the general availability of version 2.5 of its commercially licensed Zenoss Enterprise product. This latest version includes several new enterprise-grade scalability features targeted at managing today's datacenter as well as expanded management support for next generation datacenter technologies and... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Release: Hyper9 Virtual Environment Optimization suite
19 Nov 2009 | 4:42 pmHyper9 has announced the release of its Virtual Environment Optimization solution to provide better data, faster diagnosis and more reliable remediation associated with the virtualization of high performance applications. The critical nature of tier-1 business applications puts high demands on IT organizations to maintain predictable service levels and fast response times – standards that can be... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
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Data Center Knowledge
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SWAT Team 1, Servers 0
20 Nov 2009 | 1:34 pmThere are many ways a server can expire, taking your precious data with it. Most of these failures don’t provide the visual evidence of catastrophe that would be useful in, say, marketing videos for data protection providers. The folks at KeepGoing.biz, a business continuity firm in the Dallas area, wanted to give customers a visceral sense of what a catastrophic data loss might look like. Since it’s hard to simulate a meteor strike for a YouTube video, they opted to have a group of heavily-armed guys shoot the dickens out a server cabinet. Whatever this server’s sins may… -
Progress on $1.5 Billion Scotland Data Center
20 Nov 2009 | 9:41 amThis farmland near Lockerbie, Scotland could become one of the world's largest data center developments. Construction is slated to begin next year on a $1.5 billion project by Lockerbie Data Centres. A massive $1.5 billion data center project near Lockerbie, Scotland is a step closer to reality after receiving the blessing of local planning officials. Lockerbie Data Centres Ltd. proposed building the £950 million project, which it says may generate a total of £3.5 billion in investment in the region. Planning officials at the local Dumfries and Galloway Council have… -
Slashdot: Evaluating A Data Center
20 Nov 2009 | 6:23 amEarlier this week there was a discussion on Slashdot about how to evaluate a data center. The thread features more than 200 comments about items to look for and avoid when selecting a data center, including questions to ask while touring a facility. As always, there’s a variety of views, some more informed than others. But the discussion may provide useful feedback, whether you’re shopping for colo or looking for insight into potential customers. -
Inside Bay Area’s New Santa Clara Site
20 Nov 2009 | 6:06 amBay Area Internet Solutions has built a new 80,000 square foot data center in Santa Clara, Calif. that features an innovative economizer design. One end of the data center is lined with more than 200 fans to bring fresh air into an exterior “air corridor” that surrounds the data center. The air is then filtered and used in the facility’s cooling system. Bay Area Internet expects to be able to use the air economizers to provide free cooling for 85 percent of the year. This video was produced by Emerson Network Power and features its products, but also provides an inside look… -
Tier1 Research Summit Set for Dec. 8
20 Nov 2009 | 5:44 amTier1 Research, the analyst firm that tracks the hosting and colocation market, will hold its Datacenter Transformation Summit – Silicon Valley (DTSSV) on December 8 at the Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, Calif. Tier1 Research’s summit series brings together enterprise IT executives with some of the largest hosting and colocation providers in the market today. The Silicon Valley event will address reducing capital expenditures, meeting the needs of business stakeholders and sharpening the RFP process to ensure that the most value is extracted from IT investments. DTSSV has been…
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Nati Shalom's Blog
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It's Complex to be Simple
17 Nov 2009 | 7:13 amAvdi Grimm wrote an interesting post Simplicity is Complicated. Avdi bring few interesting points on how the term Simplicity is often abused to justify all sort of decisions. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” - Einstein The Meaning of Simplicity “Simplicity” means different things to different people depending on the context of the problem you’re trying to solve. Avdi provides a useful typology of cases in which the term “simplicity” is often used (and abused): minimizing unnecessary effort, hiding complexity, avoiding difficult-to-understand… -
Is Your Data Really Secured?
25 Oct 2009 | 6:37 amSecurity has always been one of those topics that we as developers or architects hate to deal with. Our ideal world would be that security is dealt with at some higher level in our data-center, and that we don't need to think about it. It turns out that some of the most recent frauds can be caused by someone from within our own organization. In this specific fraud case, the cost to SocGen was $7.7b. There was nothing specific in this incident that was a direct result of an application security failure, but it does force us to examine more carefully some of the current assumptions about… -
GigaSpaces and GoGrid: Cloud Platform for Enterprise Applications
14 Oct 2009 | 4:05 amI had few discussions in the past week with people who asked me about our recent GoGrid announcement and how our cloud offering integrates with the GoGrid environment. I’ll try to answer the most frequently asked questions below. In addition, we’re conducting a webinar where you can ask your specific questions online and watch a live demo – see details at the bottom of this post. What is the GigaSpaces cloud offering? GigaSpaces provides a set of cloud-enabled middleware services, namely data grid, messaging and Map/Reduce. These are equivalent to the Amazon SimpleDB, SQS and… -
Why Larry Don't Get It
1 Oct 2009 | 8:30 amOnce again, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, made a joke of Cloud computing, saying that "a cloud is water vapor." Ellison made the same argument last year – Geve Perry wrote a nice piece on Ellison's Anti-Cloud Computing Rant back in September 28, 2008 (note that the timing in both cases happens to be fairly close to the Oracle World event). Many of the arguments that Geva brought back then still apply today. Clearly, Larry has a vested interest to argue that “nothing is new under the Sun.” I actually tend to agree with Larry – Cloud doesn’t bring any real new technology to the… -
How Map/Reduce and the Cloud are Affecting Analytics Applications
30 Sep 2009 | 10:36 pmTwo weeks ago I gave a presentation at the Sun HPCW workshop in beautiful Regensburg, Germany. It was a great chance to meet many of the folks from the Sun Grid Engine team face to face. It was also a great chance to take a step back and look at the evolution of one of the interesting areas in the industry - analytics. Even though this is one of the more technically challenging areas, I find it odd that relatively little has been discussed about this within the developers community. In this post I will try to provide an overview of the different approaches for running analytic…
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Appistry Blog
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Cloud Computing Success Story featuring Appistry Customer -Tygart
12 Nov 2009 | 7:28 amDon’t miss our next customer webinar featuring Tygart! The webinar will discuss how Tygart leverages cloud computing to help the Intelligence Community analyze digital media and improve ID management success at a significant cost savings Date: November 19, 2009 Time: 1:00 p.m. CST/2:00 p.m. EST Register Now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/190051952 You’ll learn how Tygart uses cloud computing to: • Return a 60:1 performance improvement in video and photography processing. • Build analytics and identify individuals of interest in minutes versus hours or days. •… -
Appistry Positioned as a Visionary in Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers
29 Oct 2009 | 3:26 pmGartner, Inc. has positioned Appistry, a pioneer in private cloud computing for the enterprise, in the visionaries quadrant of its “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers” report. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers 2009 is out and Appistry received a great report! If you’ve ever gone through the Magic Quadrant evaluation procedure , you know from experience that the process is thorough and involves several analyst and customer conversations, which is why companies across the world rely on Gartner’s guidance for selecting vendors. We… -
Vote Appistry for SysCon Readers Choice Award Today!
28 Oct 2009 | 2:46 pmPlease vote for Appistry and our customers for SysCon Readers Choice Award! http://www2.sys-con.com/java/readerschoice2004/cloudvote_fall09.cfm Sys Con voting is still open for Reader’s Choice! Vote – 4 times!! Best Cloud Application: PresidioHealth Best Gov’t Cloud: Tygart MX Server Best Overall Cloud Product: Appistry CloudIQ Platform Best Private Cloud: FedEx Services -
Appistry Selected by AlwaysOn as an OnDC Top 100 Winner
15 Oct 2009 | 2:23 pmAppistry is kickin’ butt and taking names! Or in more appropriate terms – Appistry is changing the game and impacting the public sector! Appistry announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the OnDC Top 100 Winners. The OnDC 100 list represents the top 100 private companies contributing to the renewed and continued prosperity of our country. Appistry was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz. The OnDC… -
Is the Cloud Application Platform Market Going Grey?
9 Oct 2009 | 7:00 amIt’s easy to get caught up in the excitement that swirls around cloud computing. In my view, it’s probably the single most vibrant and passionate topic in technology today. Let me rephrase that: In my view, it’s probably the single most vibrant and passionate topic in business today. That’s an important distinction and one that signals the maturing of the cloud computing market. For companies like Appistry, on the leading edge of this space, that maturation manifests itself in one thing: customers. Not technology. Not hype. Just the tried and true metric of business success.
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Blog Joyent
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Joyent Raises Institutional Money: Why We Did It
Today we announced that we recently closed a round of funding from Intel Capital. As entrepreneurs who founded and nurtured Joyent since 2004, and with a company that has funded itself entirely from revenues from selling products to our customers (with the exception of early seed capital put in by ... -
25% Discount Reminder – Sun Startup Essentials Members
For the past few years Joyent has worked with the Sun Startup Essentials Group to offer its members a 25% discount on Cloud Hosting on Joyent. Sun Startup Essentials is an excellent program for those building a new business and/or launching a new idea. Becoming a member allows startups to leverage ... -
Unity 3D Skills Development Workshop – Montreal
10 Free Tickets Available for Each of the Following. Act Fast! Workshop Monday, November 16, 2009 from 12:30 PM - 4:00 PM (ET) Montreal, Quebec | Concordia University, Engineering, Computer Science, and Visual Arts Complex (EV) Networking Event Monday, November 16, 2009 at 5:30 PM (ET) Montreal, Quebec | Soupesoup Joyent is sponsoring the Upcoming dimeRocker, ... -
Introducing Joyent China
Joyent, Inc. is very happy to announce that today we are beginning operations within mainland China. http://www.joyent.com.cn Today, we have opened a limited service of the Joyent Cloud to customers within mainland China and will be opening to the general public later this year. We are happy to be working with Intel ... -
On Cloud Standards, Transparency and Data Mobility
I was on a panel last week talking about the role of infrastructure and "The Cloud" in online gaming (and I'm talking "fun" games, like Farmville, not online gambling). One of the questions was "What do you think about cloud interoperability and standards?". To which I asked, "What do you mean?" "Well, what ...
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Blog Joyent
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Joyent Raises Institutional Money: Why We Did It
Today we announced that we recently closed a round of funding from Intel Capital. As entrepreneurs who founded and nurtured Joyent since 2004, and with a company that has funded itself entirely from revenues from selling products to our customers (with the exception of early seed capital put in by ... -
25% Discount Reminder – Sun Startup Essentials Members
For the past few years Joyent has worked with the Sun Startup Essentials Group to offer its members a 25% discount on Cloud Hosting on Joyent. Sun Startup Essentials is an excellent program for those building a new business and/or launching a new idea. Becoming a member allows startups to leverage ... -
Unity 3D Skills Development Workshop – Montreal
10 Free Tickets Available for Each of the Following. Act Fast! Workshop Monday, November 16, 2009 from 12:30 PM - 4:00 PM (ET) Montreal, Quebec | Concordia University, Engineering, Computer Science, and Visual Arts Complex (EV) Networking Event Monday, November 16, 2009 at 5:30 PM (ET) Montreal, Quebec | Soupesoup Joyent is sponsoring the Upcoming dimeRocker, ... -
Introducing Joyent China
Joyent, Inc. is very happy to announce that today we are beginning operations within mainland China. http://www.joyent.com.cn Today, we have opened a limited service of the Joyent Cloud to customers within mainland China and will be opening to the general public later this year. We are happy to be working with Intel ... -
On Cloud Standards, Transparency and Data Mobility
I was on a panel last week talking about the role of infrastructure and "The Cloud" in online gaming (and I'm talking "fun" games, like Farmville, not online gambling). One of the questions was "What do you think about cloud interoperability and standards?". To which I asked, "What do you mean?" "Well, what ...
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Thinking Out Cloud
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Behind the Smokescreen
18 Nov 2009 | 9:08 amAs some of you may know, Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's big conference, is going on this week in San Francisco. This morning I received an amusing email from Chris Harrick, VP marketing at SugarCRM. I'm assuming this was sent out to everyone who signed up as press to the event. Funny stuff. The full email is below (I added the link to Benioff's book). In any case, I'll see you at Dreamforce!Hey Geva, Marc Benioff has a few zingers for SugarCRM in his new book Behind the Cloud: “We knew that we had truly emerged as the market leader in the eyes of the industry when we arrived at Dreamforce… -
Application Lifecycle in the Cloud
10 Nov 2009 | 11:52 pmCloud computing is having a profound effect on the software application lifecycle. Almost every phase of creating and rolling out software applications is now addressed by a growing number of cloud services: from prototyping, to development, testing & QA, continuous integration -- and all the way down to staging, deployment and post-production (monitoring and management). All of this can now be done in the cloud. The vision is compelling. Imagine a world in which programmers can access their development environment from any computer without having to set up anything, collaborate with… -
Amazon Reserved Instances Update
16 Oct 2009 | 11:26 amBack in March, when Amazon first came out with reserved instances for EC2 (instances you can pre-pay at a discount for a period of 1 or 3 years) I posted Amazon Reserved Instances: Do They Make Business Sense? In that post I also made available a public Zoho spreadsheet with a simple calculator that allows figuring out whether reserved instances make sense for you or not. In August, Amazon announced lower pricing for Amazon EC2 reserved instances, so I created an updated spreadsheet (if this cuts off in your browser click here): I also created a version for the European prices (full, editable… -
CloudCamp in the Cloud - Oct 22
16 Oct 2009 | 8:35 amThe organizers of the very successful CloudCamp events have put together a new virtual event called CloudCamp in the Cloud, which takes place next week. I've been to a few physical CloudCamps and they are great events, so I expect this online one to be good as well. Worth attending.Here are the details: CloudCamp, organizer of the community-based cloud computing unconference series, today announced that it’s taking its popular event series virtual with the forthcoming “CloudCamp in the Cloud CloudCamp in the Cloud, to be held Thursday, October 22, 2009 from 12 noon to 3 pm Eastern… -
Yahoo and Cloudera Discuss Hadoop Next Week
15 Oct 2009 | 10:28 pmMy friend Dekel Tankel sent me some information about the next Hadoop user group, which takes place at the Yahoo campus in Santa Clara on Wednesday, October 21, 2009. Sounds like an interesting line up and agenda: 6-6:15 - Socializing and Beers 6:15-6:45 - Mumak - Using Simulation for Large-scale Distributed System Verification and Debugging Hong Tang - Yahoo! Large-scale distributed systems such as MapReduce are notoriously hard to verify & debug. An effective approach to address many of these challenges is through simulation. In this talk, I am going to present Mumak, a MapReduce…
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Delicious/awsbuzz
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Bio-IT World - Warm Wellcome for Cloud Computing
16 Nov 2009 | 9:37 am"If you want to compute across the Ensembl genome dataset, thats all there in Amazon, so when you spin up your virtual machines, you dont have to worry about downloading a copy of Ensembl and uploading it back into Amazonits already there. That model is quite appealing." -
Bio-IT World
11 Nov 2009 | 1:19 pm"Over the past year, Phillpott has built up Virtual Data Center capabilities in four major areas using Amazon EC2 and other providers." -
How to combine Elastic Mapreduce/Hadoop with other Amazon Web Services
11 Nov 2009 | 9:37 am"This posting shows how to load boto in an Elastic Mapreduce mapper and gives a simple example how to use simpledb from the same mapper." -
Moving to the cloud
10 Nov 2009 | 1:06 pm"Last week we also decommissioned the last of our physical servers. We are now operating our entire website "in the cloud" as the kids would say. Specifically, we are using Amazon Web Services." -
Nortel: News Releases: Nortel Provides On-Demand Access to Cloud-Based Real-Time Applications
5 Nov 2009 | 10:46 am"On-demand access to Nortel's unified communications-based applications, which includes Nortel Contact Center , Interactive Communications Portal and Agile Communication Environment , is accessible via an information-rich portal."
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Amazon Web Services Blog
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AWS News Summary...
12 Nov 2009 | 5:57 amHere's a summary of the AWS announcements that we made last night: Important updates to our Security Center including a revised AWS Security White Paper and the results of our SAS 70 type II audit. A plan to bring AWS to datacenters in Asia. Selection of the finalists in the 2009 Start-Up Challenge. Congratulations to Bizo, FlightCaster, Gazaro, GoodData, Involver, Motally, and ReTel Technologies. The final event will take place on December 9th in Sunnyvale, California. Register if you'd like to attend. The AWS SDK for .NET Developers. Brand new Developer Centers for .NET, PHP, Ruby, and… -
New AWS SDK for .NET Developers
11 Nov 2009 | 8:43 pmThe new AWS SDK for .NET Developers will provide you with the libraries, code samples, and documentation needed to build an AWS-powered application using any programming language capable of making .NET calls including C#, Visual Basic, Windows PowerShell, and so forth. The SDK includes the following goodies: A new AWS .NET Library - This library provides a set of developer-friendly APIs that hide much of the low-level plumbing associated with programming for the AWS cloud, including authentication, retries, and error handing. The library supports the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Auto… -
New Amazon CloudFront Feature: Private Content
11 Nov 2009 | 7:25 pmYou can now use Amazon CloudFront to distribute private content such as digital downloads, training materials, personalized documents, or media files. You can use this new feature to implement the following types of access models: Access only allowed after a specified date/time. Access only allowed between a pair of dates/times. Access only allowed before a specified date/time. You can then enable access from a designated IP address or IP address range by using the CIDR notation. You can allow a single IP address (one user or client system) or a range of addresses (perhaps a school or a… -
Cloud Computing and Mobile Devices at the BlackBerry Developer Conference
9 Nov 2009 | 7:38 pmAWS user Bob Wise (VP of Engineering for Melodeo, producer of nuTsie) asked me to pass along some information about his upcoming session at the BlackBerry Developer Conference (November 9-12 in San Francisco). Here's the scoop: Developers who want to build scalable, cost-effective cloud-based solutions will be interested in this session. Learn about Melodeo's client/server technical architecture which runs entirely on Amazon's AWS cloud computing platform. Since Melodeo's service with nuTsie streams media and is a large-scale service, we’ll also cover scaling and… -
The AWS Blog: The First Five Years
9 Nov 2009 | 10:46 amI was checking out the archive for this blog and realized that I wrote my first post exactly five years ago! In that time I've written posts to introduce each of our new services. Here's a quick recap of the highlights: We started out with the November 2004 introduction of the Amazon Simple Queue Service - When we rolled this out five years ago, I think the general reaction was "Huh? Why would Amazon do that?" I think it is now pretty obvious that a scalable messaging model is an essential component of a scalable system architecture. The next step was Amazon S3 in the spring…
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Tags @ alan.blog-city.com
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Amazon takes MySQL to the cloud; or have they?
27 Oct 2009 | 2:43 amAmazon have released a slew of new features and products for their cloud. But as usual, the devil is in the detail. I go into some of the issues and discover that this may not be for everyone. -
Engadget claims "biggest disasters in the history of cloud computing"
11 Oct 2009 | 9:35 amEngadget falls into the same trap that many bloggers/journalists have; not everything that runs in a browser is cloud computing. One server fault does not mark the end of cloud computing. It does leave many asking what cloud computing is. -
Amazon makes sharing data easier with shared EBS
24 Sep 2009 | 2:36 amAmazon releases the ability to share EBS snapshots so others can utilise and consume your data, irrespective of format. -
Amazon SimpleDB + SQS : Simple Java POJO Access
6 Sep 2009 | 9:21 amAmazon SimpleDB - SQS web services are within easy reach of any java developer with these 2 non-dependent class files. No fuss, no nonsense, just code that works. -
A Simple Java class for Amazon SimpleSQS
31 Aug 2009 | 9:20 amA very simple POJO Java class for accessing all of the features of Amazon's SQS web service. Full API support. No dependencies. Just use it!
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Nubeblog
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Dreamforce 2009, día 2
19 Nov 2009 | 6:49 pmEl segundo día del evento ha comenzado con otra Keynote dedicada a la plataforma Force.com. De nuevo Marc Benioff en el escenario haciendo de maestro de ceremonias (se le ve en su salsa) presentándonos las bondades del producto. Antes de seguir, comentar algo que discutimos algunos colegas el día anterior: ¿Es realmente Salesforce una empresa CRM o ya no lo es y su negocio es las plataformas? ¿Debería cambiarse el nombre a ‘Force’ en vez de Salesforce.com? Algunas de estas preguntas me las respondió Martin Woodson en una entrevista que intentaré publicar mañana. Pero… -
Dreamforce 2009, día 1
19 Nov 2009 | 7:34 amHoy miércoles empieza oficialmente el evento Dreamforce 2009 de Salesforce. Aunque el lunes y el martes se han dedicado a realizar actividades más pequeñas de formación y difusión, así como el registro. Lo primero que te llama la atención del evento es el tamaño. Se habla de 12000 asistentes. La sala de la KeyNote es inmensa (unos 10000 en la sala), nada comparado a lo que he visto en Europa. Para hacer un símil, llenad de sillas uno de los pabellos grandes de IFEMA y tenéis algo que se aproxima. Ahora llenad otros tres pabellones de IFEMA de salas y teneís el Moscone Center al… -
Dreamforce 2009, El evento Cloud de Salesforce
11 Nov 2009 | 1:21 pmEl día 17 de Noviembre se celebra en San Francisco uno de los eventos de Cloud Computing más importantes del mundo, Dreamforce 2009. Este evento gira alrededor de los productos que Salesforce.com ha desarrollado para La Nube. Para el que no lo sepa, Salesforce.com fue uno de los pioneros del Software as a Service -antes de que se llamase SaaS-, y es uno de las empresas que más ha apostado por el Software y las Plataformas como Servicios. El evento es enorme, con más de 300 sesiones programadas para el CRM, force.com y soluciones verticales para cada industria. También hay jornadas de… -
Las charlas sobre Virtualizacion y Cloud del MadridOnRails
22 Oct 2009 | 2:50 amAyer estuve por primera vez en MadridOnRails. Tuve el placer de compartir ponencia con Victor Fernández, OpenSolaris Community Leader en España, que dio una visión muy detallada del panorama de la Virtualización. Luego yo ataqué con el tema del Cloud Computing y con las bondades de las Nubes Privadas. Aquí están las presentaciones, que las disfrutéis: MadridOnRails – De la Virtualización al Cloud Computing: Cómo implantar una Nube Privada con código abierto View more presentations from abiquodocs. Post relacionados:Charla sobre cómo aprovechar las Nubes Privadas en… -
Charla sobre cómo aprovechar las Nubes Privadas en MadridOnRails
14 Oct 2009 | 11:47 pmEl próximo día 21 de octubre daré una charla en el centro para la promoción del software libre MadridOnRails. La agenda del evento es la siguiente: “Virtualización y Cloud Computing” LUGAR CELEBRACIÓNCentro MADRIDONRAILS FECHA DE CELEBRACIÓN: Miércoles 21 de Octubre de 2009, de 17:00 a 19:00 PARA REGISTRARTE: PINCHA AQUI TELÉFONO DE CONTACTO: 91 564 28 78 AGENDA: 1) ”Virtualizacion de Servidores en Sistemas Abiertos (Open Source)” - Nombre: Víctor M. Fernández Gómez - Cargo: Responsable de Servicios Gestionados de Sistemas & Almacenamiento en SIA /…
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Haut Tec
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SaaS Case Study: Using Innovation Games for New Products
19 Nov 2009 | 11:32 amAt Scio, we use Innovation Games with our clients in several contexts, from new product definition to ongoing product management. For a new product design, the games help us work with our client team to uncover customer requirements that are still loosely defined, as well as to help our development team understand the key selling points of a product. For ongoing product management, the games help us work with client product managers to come up with new ideas, develop and prioritize their product roadmap and identify issues hampering their success. Innovation Games are a series of serious… -
SaaS: DIY or Eat Your Own Dog Food?
12 Nov 2009 | 7:48 amI’ve noticed there are broadly two camps when it comes to developing new services for the Internet: Those entrepreneurs that feel they must do everything themselves regardless of the hurdles they face and those that want to focus on their core expertise and leverage outside services where possible. Of course, there are also those that sit on the fence and never make a clear decision either way, but since for the most part the fence-sitters haven’t and won’t develop a service anytime soon – they fall outside the scope of this discussion. And frankly – they are… -
SaaS: Agile, Marketing & the Wheel of Death
30 Oct 2009 | 11:40 amIn our first two podcasts for Haut Tech Conversations we covered service and pricing. Both subjects are critical for SaaS businesses to consider and understand in the context of their product. In the podcast we did yesterday, we went into yet another critical area – Marketing! To put us in the right frame of mind for this conversation, we brought the respected expert on SaaS Marketing, Peter Cohen of SaaS Marketing Strategy Partners together with our panel – Ron Arden, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing for eDocument Sciences and Justin Pirie, a SaaS and Cloud product… -
SaaS Workshop: Charting Your Course to SaaS
21 Oct 2009 | 12:33 pmSaaS is not a “one-size-fits-all” business. There are many options now for platforms and services you can use and the number is increasing every day. A lot of the information available is laden with marketing hype. How do you make the right decisions? We’ve been helping companies transition to SaaS as startups and from traditional licensed software for several years and we’ve build up a practice we use repeatedly to navigate the choices. We’re bringing our practice to the Dallas SaaS University event as a workshop to help SaaS executives and entrepreneurs make… -
SaaS: 10 Ways to Fail – Part 2
9 Oct 2009 | 12:17 pmIn Part 1 of this list we covered the first five points – so if you haven’t read that already, I encourage you to go and read that first. For everyone else – here’s the remaining five points in my hit parade: 6. Plan a yearly release cycle in conjunction with industry trade shows. For marketing, product managers and developers with any experience in the software industry – this is a natural tendency. For the past 30 years, release schedules have rode the waves of industry events like clockwork. Because of the close association with end-users, a subscription…
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BlueLock
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Cloud Computing Tops Tech Trends to Watch in 2010
20 Nov 2009 | 11:46 amOf course cloud computing would be the top technology trend to watch in 2010, that’s not a surprise at all. As we all know, the economy hasn’t bounced back too much, so the focus is still on getting the biggest bang for your buck and making the most economical investments and that will lead us right in to 2010 when the chief issues will again be around the economy and cloud computing.Brian Dooley points out in his article “Top tech: the trends to watch in 2010,” “the economy has brought about industry consolidation and re-evaluation of expenditure which… -
Yes, Cloud Computing is Credible for Education.
17 Nov 2009 | 1:16 pmWhat makes education different from any other business with hundreds or thousands of users? The economics are all the same, so why wouldn’t the education industry be able to benefit from the advantages of cloud computing like other organizations? A recent article in Campus Technology entitled, “Is Cloud Computing a Credible Solution for Education?” visits that subject.Bruce Schneier points out that cloud computing is really nothing new. Hotmail and Gmail have been doing it for a long time; social networking sites, remote backup companies and remote email… -
A YouTube Course in "Cloud"
17 Nov 2009 | 12:29 pmNew to the idea of Software as a Service SaaS Virtualization? This video from Salesfor will help bring you up to speed: This short video clip, produced by Salesforce.com, effectively points out that managed cloud hosting is a superior way to run your business. It's clear that multitenancy is simply a more efficient way to approach IT infrastructure. For those of you who are new to cloud, some of the major benefits of cloud computing are that your data is: secure backed up in another location (redundant) not limited in storage or resources To help you better understand Infrastructure as a… -
Email Functions: The Big Cloud Consumer
16 Nov 2009 | 11:32 amA recent email industry survey shows how businesses are reacting to email infrastructure being migrated to the cloud. Osterman Research found that security-related email functions are dominating the software as a service market today and that the functions most likely to be outsourced in the future, if not already, include anti-spam, bulk email, anti-virus an anti-malware.What factors are holding companies back from migrating to the cloud? Findings show that more companies haven’t migrated to the cloud because of privacy concerns, data retrieval concerns (will they be able… -
Shhhh Stuff Happens…In the Cloud
13 Nov 2009 | 7:26 amBy now everyone has heard about the T-Mobile Sidekick crash in one of Danger’s (a Microsoft subsidiary) cloud computing environments. Just like every time Gmail goes down, there is a wide and broad brush of FUD painted across the cloud computing canvas. Stephen Foskett recently wrote a blog post that talks about the shocking “bubblegum and baling wire” approach that some companies take when delivering cloud computing storage. I couldn’t agree with him more. There are some hokey things going on in the world of cloud storage, otherwise these…
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Cassatt Data Center Dialog
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Salesforce.com and CA: using Force.com for agile and SaaS-y results
19 Nov 2009 | 11:24 amI don't normally spend too much time on application development topics, but CA has a bit of interesting SaaS-related news coming out of Dreamforce today that I thought was worth noting. And when an event bills itself as The Cloud Computing Event of the Year, I guess it's something I should at least mention.Despite salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s marathon keynote on Wednesday, he – and the -
Two cloud computing Rorschach tests: 'legacy clouds' and the lock-in lesson
11 Nov 2009 | 9:38 pmThis week's San Francisco Cloud Computing Club gathering was a great place to meet some of the movers and shakers in the cloud computing market (or at least the ones within a short drive of San Francisco). The event's concept was to spend some quality time talking through cloud computing issues with a crowd of people who spend all day thinking about the cloud and working on making it a -
Fumble! What not to do at a cloud computing conference
6 Nov 2009 | 10:13 am<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> -
IT management nirvana? Smells like virtual and physical control
27 Oct 2009 | 9:07 pmI was very amused by the headline on Denise Dubie's Network World article this week about CA's big multi-product announcement. It noted that CA and other management vendors were working toward IT management "nirvana" -- a state that IT has been pretty far away from. Especially when virtualization gets involved.So, what's the main difference between where we are now and what she described? "Now" -
Scientists v. Cowboys: How cloud computing looks from Europe
21 Oct 2009 | 8:01 pmIs Europe following the U.S. on cloud computing...or vice versa?While I was over in Berlin for a chunk of the summer, I had a chance to connect up with some of the discussions going on in Europe around cloud computing. It's true, high tech information these days knows no international boundaries. Articles that originally run in North American IT pubs are picked up wholesale by their European
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The 2.0 Life
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13 Actually Interesting Business and Finance Blogs
20 Nov 2009 | 3:38 amOkay, full disclosure: I couldn’t possibly care any less about finance. Stocks, bonds, investments, futures, pasts, eventuallies (I might be making things up now)—they’re just not interesting to me. It’s complicated, difficult to learn, and as someone who doesn’t subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, I just don’t care. In reality, though, I need to know these things, whether it’s economic news or business tips—but I don’t care! But a few awesome websites are changing that, making business and finance actually interesting. Thanks to incredibly smart, patient people, there are… -
10 Great Blogs for Food Lovers
16 Nov 2009 | 3:38 amPost by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter One of the things I get asked all the time is what I read: the blogs, websites, and random web-itude that helps me waste the phenomenally large amount of time I spend online. So, this week, I’m going to spend a few posts highlighting the best blogs out there, for all kinds of people. Blogs are emphatically NOT just for tech-heads, or Web-lovers. They’re for everyone, because they’re by everyone. To prove it to you, here are ten of the best blogs out there about the world’s greatest thing: food. The Pioneer Woman I’d certainly be remiss not to… -
What’s in My Browser: David Pierce
12 Nov 2009 | 3:45 amPost by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter This is the second in a series of posts, about what we all use in our browsers. They’re now where we spend most of our time, and everyone’s got it tweaked a little differently. Here’s mine. After recently converting to Mac, I had a chance to completely refresh my computing habits. I didn’t install anything up-front, and only installed what I needed as I went along. That’s made my browser faster, leaner, and without some of the extra nonsense I didn’t really need anyway. Here’s how it looks now: Browser I use Firefox, 99.9% of the time. -
Posterous Turns Anyone Into a Blogging Powerhouse
9 Nov 2009 | 7:46 amPost by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter The Internet’s in the middle of an incredibly important shift: it’s moving away from a closed, geek-only space with tons of prerequisites and knowledge required, to a place where anyone can be involved, share themselves, and partake in all of the cool stuff the Internet has to offer. A lot of this is due to social networks. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and others are making both the creation and the consumption of information – whether it’s about our friends, issues that interest us, or whatever – easier than ever. This ease of use is a crucial… -
15 Ways Facebook Can Get You an A+
6 Nov 2009 | 3:55 amThis is a guest post from Karen Schweitzer, who writes on About.com and about Online Classes. Facebook’s not just a gigantic time-sink, making you less and less productive as the service gets more and more popular. There are lots of ways to make Facebook more useful, and apps are one of the best. Thanks to its huge universe of applications, Facebook actually offers a number of ways for students, and anyone who’s still game for a little learning, to figure out something new. These apps can enhance online learning, give you more control over your schedule, and make it easier to…
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Data Center Networks
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Why Standards Matter…And When They Don’t
13 Nov 2009 | 12:07 amThe year was 1992, Disney’s Aladdin was the top grossing movie, Garth Brooks had the top-selling album in the US, and I was a freshly minted SE. Being a studious and diligent SE, I read up on all the gear sold by the integrator I worked for, and I decided that the Wellfleet BCN was the product of choice for our customers based on its hardware architecture and the impressive list of standards to which it laid claim. And, then a funny thing happened…I learned that, while customers value standards compliance, what they value even more are networks that work and do what… -
New Book Published from Cisco IT
12 Nov 2009 | 11:44 amNot sure if you’ve seen it yet but a great book for anybody trying to define what a “Green” data center means and take steps towards migrating to one. I’ve known Doug Alger for about 4 years now, he is a Solutions Architect within Cisco IT. Doug does is a rare breed, he has a strong facilities background but is employed by an IT operation. Doug often jokes that if Facilities and IT departments had no issues in planning and management, his job would go away. I was privileged to provide technical editing for this book and from what I know in the… -
Every cloud needs a net
6 Nov 2009 | 1:12 pmMost enterprises have been exploring cloud computing to see how it might work for them. Cloud computing offers the ability to run servers on the Internet on demand. The storage, compute, and network functions are positioned and ready for use, so servers can be deployed within minutes, and paid for only for as long as they are in use. An essential component of any cloud installation is its network. When servers are deployed in a cloud, they need an external network to be usable. The network services that they need are more than simple IP connectivity, and each… -
Virtual Computing Environment coalition -Can you list the benefits for your company ?
3 Nov 2009 | 4:11 pmYou probably didn’t miss the today announcement of the coalition between Cisco, EMC and VMware designed to address the challenges of pervasive virtualization and private cloud computing .We met Mark Fulgham , Vice-President Data Center Solutions to get his point of view on the Virtual Computing Environment coalition , on the Vblock Infrastructure Packages approach .In this short extract , Mark Fulgham describes some of the benefits he sees for our customers. We also invite two customers, a CIO and a CTO to share their analysis of the Vblock… -
Wishful Thinking: The Innovation Edition
29 Oct 2009 | 6:09 pmI am an unabashed fan of social networking. For the data center team, being able to get direct, unfiltered feedback from the market has been a boon for making sure we are tracking in the right direction. I also thoroughly enjoy the online conversations on the various blogs and in Twitter. There are a great number of people out there with a lot of good thinking on the data center and I highly encourage you to do a little googling to get plugged into these conversations. There are folks out there with views diametrically opposed to mine (you know who you are) but they…
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Kaavo
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More on Benefits and Challenges of Cloud Computing
7 Nov 2009 | 6:20 pmHere is the revised version of the bar-chart I posted in the previous blog showing the evolution of IT to explain the benefits and challenges of cloud computing, and showing why and how we got to cloud computing.Dedicated Physical Servers: Each application owner bought servers for running their application/s.Physical Server Consolidation: Moving from physical servers to dedicated servers to consolidated physical servers resulted in greater server utilization, however it increased time to market significantly as multiple applications sharing same server have to worry about configuration… -
IT Evolution From Dedicated Physical Servers To Cloud: Benefits and Challenges
13 Sep 2009 | 7:37 pmAfter the earlier blog discussing the evolution of IT, I had several discussions on the benefits and challenges of virtualization, private, and public clouds. Following bar chart is an attempt to capture the benefits and challenges of various phases of IT evolution from the days of having dedicated physical servers for each application to the use of public cloud. The chart is self explanatory, some key points to note are:Going from virtualization to private cloud is basically a step to provide self service capabilities to the application owners. It increases… -
Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud
26 Aug 2009 | 8:10 pmAmazon took the lead in addressing one of key objections of enterprise customers to cloud adoption by announcing the Virtual Private Cloud today. Jeff Barr at AWS has done a great job in explaining the technical details of the solution. The solution goes a long way in addressing some of the concerns we encountered first hand at Kaavo in dealing with enterprise customers. Recently I blogged about a solution we had to implement using open source tools to address the needs of one of our customers. We were hoping that someone is going to step up to the plate and offer… -
Building a Private Cloud within a Public Cloud
29 Jul 2009 | 2:26 pmOne of our customers wanted to establish a site to site connectivity between their datacenter and public cloud (Amazon EC2) and then have a private network within Amazon EC2 with their own custom IP addresses for their servers in the cloud. Basically idea here is to augment the internal datacenter resources with the resources in the public cloud securely so that the servers in the cloud appear as if they are part of their own private corporate network. The idea here is to isolate the servers used by the customer in the cloud from the rest of the servers in the cloud using… -
SaaS vs. IaaS: Key trade-off has nothing to do with vendor lock
22 Mar 2009 | 10:35 pmLately there were some blogs implying that businesses should pick Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) over Software as a Service (SaaS) as SaaS has higher vendor lock compared to IaaS. There has been a lot of buzz around the three flavors of cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. It is important for business and IT leaders to understand the true trade-offs; when would it make sense to pick one over the other. Though it is true that SaaS has greater vendor lock, the reason a customer picks SaaS vs. IaaS has less to do with the vendor lock and has more to do with the type…
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Daily AWS Wtf
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SimpleDB Gotcha - A Follow-Up
12 Nov 2009 | 7:56 amTwo weeks ago we posted something about the terms and conditions of SimpleDB and how they simply stated that data could be deleted after six months. Thankfully Amazon didn’t leave that rather ambiguous claim as it is and recently updated their customer agreement appropriately: 5.8.2. […] If during the previous six (6) months you have incurred no fees for SimpleDB and have registered no usage of Your Amazon SimpleDB Content, we may delete, without liability of any kind, Your Amazon SimpleDB Content upon thirty (30) days prior notice to you. Still not great to know your data might get… -
SimpleDB gotcha
28 Oct 2009 | 1:58 amWhile carefully reading through the AWS Customer Agreement we found this interesting paragraph: 5.8.2 […] We may delete, without liability of any kind, any of your Amazon SimpleDB Content that has not been accessed in the previous 6 months. Ouch! While SimpleDB keeps surprising us, for our EC2 cluster management platform Scalarium we switched to CouchDB and Redis some time ago. Turns out SimpleDB is sometimes too simple. — @jweiss -
Amazon Announces New EC2 And AWS Features
27 Oct 2009 | 3:40 amToday started with a bang, there’s no doubt about that. With three simple announcements Amazon introduced two new features for their Elastic Compute Cloud: Relational Database Service and new high memory instance types. Until now EC2 the highest memory you could get was 15.5GB. While that’s a lot, it’s not enough for some applications where databases have out-grown that amount of memory. If that was your excuse so far to not give EC2 a spin, you’re finally out of excuses. Today Amazon introduced two new instances types, one with 34GB and one with 68GB of memory. Cashing in at $1.20… -
How About Reserved S3 Storage?
16 Oct 2009 | 4:28 amDuring lunch with the technical leads from SoundCloud they floated a simple yet genius idea, especially for customers with very large storage requirements on S3 like they are: Reserved Storage. Reserve so many terabytes per year for a certain amount of time, pay an upfront amount for that, and get greatly reduced monthly storage costs. Sounds like an excellent idea to me, and would be an very logical addition to Reserved Instances.. They asked their local AWS evangelist about it already, so who knows? Maybe it’s somewhere on the horizon. -
Does Greatly Increased Network Traffic on EC2 Instances Decrease EBS Performance?
7 Oct 2009 | 2:24 amI’m sort of throwing this out there. BitBucket, a source code hosting service based on Mercurial and running on EC2 and off EBS volumes, had a long downtime recently, and it was apparently caused by a DDoS attack flooding their servers with spoofed UDP traffic. Putting aside the initial oddness with Amazon’s support and that having such an insanely long downtime sucks big time, one thing is quite interesting to consider. Access to their EBS volumes was horribly slow while the network traffic peaked out. The network traffic increase seemed to correlate directly to the decrease of EBS…
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Sam Johnston
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HOWTO: Fix OS X by uninstalling Adobe Flash
30 Oct 2009 | 6:27 amAdobe Flash just ruined my day for the last time... I've just arrived in Paris and needed to do some work before a meeting this afternoon. As it's noisy here I didn't hear the MacBook's fans running at full speed trying to compensate for a single rogue Flash ad in a tab in Google Chrome. The result was that my full 4 hour battery was reduced to less than 40 minutes and I now have no chance of getting everything I wanted to do done. Instead I'm going to use the remaining 20 minutes to tell you how to rid yourself of Flash once and for all, and in doing so enjoy the following… -
An open letter to the NoSQL community
27 Oct 2009 | 10:17 amFollowing some discussion on Twitter today I posted this thread to the nosql-discussion group. You can see the outcome for yourself (essentially, and unsurprisingly I might add, "please feel free to take your software and call it whatever you want").While I don't want to mess with their momentum (it's a good cause, if branded with an unfortunate name) this isn't the first time the issue's been raised and I doubt it will be the last. I do however think that "no SQL" is completely missing the point and that the core concern is trading consistency for scalability. At the end of the day… -
Twitter's down for the count. What are we going to do about it?
27 Oct 2009 | 5:21 amWhat's wrong with this picture?There's not a single provider for telephony (AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.)There's not a single provider for text messaging (AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.)There's not a single provider for instant messaging (GTalk, MSN, AIM, etc.)There's not a single provider for e-mail (GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.)There's not a single provider for blogging (Blogger, Wordpress, etc.)There's not a single provider for "mini" blogging (Tumblr, Posterous, etc.)There IS a single provider for micro blogging (Twitter)And it's down for the count (everything from the main site to the API is… -
Cloud or Not?
12 Oct 2009 | 4:50 pmAs it seems people still just don't get what is, and what is not (*cough*Sidekick*cough*) cloud computing, I've put together a (tongue-in-cheek) flowchart to help you decide: -
If it's dangerous it's NOT cloud computing
12 Oct 2009 | 5:32 amHaving written something similar over the weekend myself (How Open Cloud could have saved Sidekick users' skins) I was getting ready to complement Reuven Cohen on his latest post (really), but fear-mongering title aside (Cloud Computing is Dangerous) I was dismayed to see this:"Let's call it what it is, it's a cloud app -- your data when using a Sidekick is hosted in some elses data center."I simply can not and will not accept this, and I'm not the only one:Help me out here. I'm seeing really smart people I totally respect jump on this T-Mobile issue as a "Cloud" failure. Am I…
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Cloud Computing News and Resources - onCloudComputing
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2ND POWEREDBYCLOUD LAUNCHES NEXT STRATEGIC EUROPEAN FORUM FOR BUSINESS LEADERS
19 Nov 2009 | 9:37 pmThe market leader and only European forum for business leaders and strategists in the cloud space, 2nd PoweredbyCloud (www.poweredbycloud.com) which will take place 8-9 February 2010, has been launched today alongside the Cloud Law summit, the first legal forum for cloud computing in Europe. The organisers, consulting firm BroadGroup, says that two big themes are emerging for debate at the 2010 PoweredByCloud conference: the business and technological case for Private Cloud and the growth and implications of Mobile Cloud services. The forum will offer industry leaders the opportunity to… -
Outsourced internet infrastructure services leader, Savvis to Participate in Cloud Computing Services Panel Discussion
13 Nov 2009 | 12:23 amSavvis, Inc., a global leader in outsourced internet IT infrastructure services for enterprises, announced today that David Shacochis, vice president of research and development, will be participating in a panel discussion at the Thomas Weisel Partners Emerging Communications Conference at 11 a.m. ET on November 18. The panel discussion will focus on cloud computing services, the technologies that make cloud computing possible, as well as the practicality of using cloud servers versus dedicated servers. Greg Freiberg, chief financial officer for Savvis, will also be in attendance. A webcast… -
Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce received four honors at the UK Software Satisfaction Awards
11 Nov 2009 | 1:18 pmSalesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http:// www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced that it received four honors at the UK Software Satisfaction Awards. Based on end-user votes, the company was recognized as winners in the SME CRM Software of the Year, Enterprise CRM Software of the Year, and Contact Centre Software of the Year categories. In addition, salesforce.com was named the Software Vendor of the Year by a panel of influential technology experts. Check the Top cloud computing companies and find the best cloud computing company for your… -
Utility storage provider 3PAR streamlines storage server provisioning for clustered and virtual server environments
10 Nov 2009 | 1:13 pm3PAR® (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today three new platform enhancements designed to automate and streamline storage server provisioning, particularly in clustered and virtual server environments. 3PAR Autonomic Groups, new utility storage software designed to enhance datacenter agility and efficiency, enables users to create volume groups on 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers that simplify, automate, and expedite storage provisioning, monitoring, and data protection in clustered and virtual server environments. Also announced today, 3PAR Scheduler… -
SuccessFactors adds its weight behind Europe’s first ever Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud services business community, EuroCloud.
10 Nov 2009 | 12:10 pmToday SuccessFactors, Inc., the global leader in business execution software, added its weight behind Europe’s first ever Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud services business community, EuroCloud. Led by Pierre-Jose Billotte, President and Founder of the French ASP Forum, with a team of SaaS and cloud computing players from the UK, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, with discussions under way in ten other countries including Germany, Italy, Poland and the Ukraine, EuroCloud gathers together leading SaaS vendors, enablers,…
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In(tegrate) the Clouds
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The Defining Capability For Cloud Computing
17 Nov 2009 | 10:41 amCheck out this post on the Perspectives Blog: “Introducing Informatica Cloud 9 – The Defining Capability For Cloud Computing.” This paragraph says it all: “Cloud computing is re-defining IT and data integration needs to follow-suit. It is data integration that will be THE defining capability for cloud computing – not outsourced datacenters, or sexy new application solutions. So, to really embrace cloud computing, one needs a whole new way of delivering enterprise data integration that brings together the ease of use that business users require with the… -
Building and Sharing Custom Functions with the Informatica Cloud Platform
16 Nov 2009 | 11:12 pmIn this demonstration, you’ll see how to build a custom function using Informatica PowerCenter and run it within the Informatica Cloud. -
Data Integration Cloud Platform as a Service
16 Nov 2009 | 12:58 pmFrom today’s cloud data integration announcement: “With an enterprise data integration as a service platform, developers and Systems Integrator (SI) partners tcan build, share and reuse custom data integration and data quality mappings and run them in the cloud. Developers can productively collaborate within IT teams to create reusable data integration and data quality mappings in the cloud or on premise. Business users can easily configure data rules themselves or run mappings built by IT using Informatica Cloud Services for self-service data integration.” Partner and… -
SAP to Salesforce Synch with the Informatica Cloud Platform
16 Nov 2009 | 8:22 amHere’s a demonstration of the Informatica Cloud Platform at work – building a complex SAP mapping and running it as a custom integration Cloud Service. -
Salesforce Integration with Navision
12 Nov 2009 | 2:37 pmHere’s a common use case for Salesforce CRM integration: opportunity-to-order synchronization with Microsoft Dynamics Navision.
