Cloud Computing

• 
  The Wisdom of Clouds

• IBM launches development and test cloud

  James Urquhart

  4 Nov 2009 | 11:45 pm

  IBM 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?

  James Urquhart

  1 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am

  With 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'

  James Urquhart

  27 Oct 2009 | 2:23 pm

  Much 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

  James Urquhart

  19 Oct 2009 | 1:16 pm

  There 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?

• Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 4

  James Urquhart

  13 Oct 2009 | 1:50 pm

  The community that may be most attracted to the cloud-computing model in the long term are those who have the least direct interaction with the underlying technologies that enable it--application end users.

• 
  Sustainable Global Clouds

• Texas sees IBM incapable of recovering lost data; takes away voter system from ~$1Bn project from IBM

  Tarry Singh

  6 Nov 2009 | 12:27 am

  88% o agencies survey were dissatisfied with IBM services. This is definitely not the only region IBM is having trouble. In EMEA IBM has lost several large accounts to competitors as there were irreconcilable differences and poor service that was being delivered by IBM. Many APAC economies that opened up their budgets and got IBM/HP on [...]

• IBM launches TDaaS (Test and Development as a Service) Beta!

  Tarry Singh

  6 Nov 2009 | 12:17 am

  All of the services related to this new test and development platform are available as REST interfaces and can be tooled for public, private or hybrid clouds. Though optimized for IBM’s own middleware products, the company claims it is willing to help customers integrate its development and test platform with best-of-breed stacks as well. “Development teams [...]

• Cloud Reality Check: Big software companies have duped customers for decades

  Tarry Singh

  5 Nov 2009 | 8:08 am

  Very interesting series of thought by this CEO at Ingress Read on: If you’re ready to embrace change and begin looking at more cost efficient and innovative ways to run your IT infrastructure, here are five tips to help you extract yourself from expensive Big Software contracts that are holding your company hostage: 1. Introduce real competition to [...]

• Should Tony Blair become the next EU president; forget Europeans, British disagree vehemently as well!

  Tarry Singh

  5 Nov 2009 | 12:27 am

  Look at the massively growing comments. Interesting comments. Britons are pissed as this pissing contest of going for some fake place in the history, while UK is being brought down to its knees. Most of my British buddies are so pissed and disillusioned that these talented folks are deciding to leave UK for good. I am [...]

• VMware: “Microsoft is tricking you with its free downloads of Hyper-V”

  Tarry Singh

  3 Nov 2009 | 9:14 pm

  VMware Australia and New Zealand managing director Paul Harapin said companies such as Microsoft do not give software away for free out of the goodness of their hearts, “they don’t make money on free applications, so you know they are making money somewhere else. Nothing is free.” (VMWare’s opinion notwithstanding, NBR does rather like Microsoft’s [...]

• 
  Cloud Feed

• Daily Cloud Feed - Nov 6, 2009

  daily

  6 Nov 2009 | 3:45 pm

  This post is a daily aggregation of all news links from @onsaas. This post is automatically generated everyday at 11:45PM UTC. A Guide To Cisco’s Shopping Basket ForbesCisco’s 2007 acquisition of software-as-a-service firm Webex puts it incompetition with Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) and IBM ( IBM - news -people …(more) The top 10 reasons why Nehalem is ideal for the cloud ZDNetOne of the most exciting uses of this new platform will be as a keybuilding block in cloud computing infrastructure. Whether you’ve boughtinto the hype of …(more) Japan’s…

• Daily Cloud Feed - Nov 5, 2009

  daily

  5 Nov 2009 | 3:45 pm

  This post is a daily aggregation of all news links from @onsaas. This post is automatically generated everyday at 11:45PM UTC. WSJ BLOG/Cisco Call Recap: ‘Putting The Gas Pedal All The Way Down’ Wall Street Journal5:09 pm Following EMC/vmware/Cisco partnership, the key industry transitionhappening is from data centers to the cloud, “bringing IT as a service tolife,” …(more) Microsoft In Cloud Computing Deal With Taiwan Gov’t, Firm AHNMicrosoft also plans to establish cloud computing partnerships withfinancial institutions and hardware companies.

• Daily Cloud Feed - Nov 4, 2009

  daily

  4 Nov 2009 | 3:45 pm

  This post is a daily aggregation of all news links from @onsaas. This post is automatically generated everyday at 11:45PM UTC. Microsoft’s cloud pricing falls closer to earth National Business ReviewSmall businesses that don’t have the infrastructure, can access thetechnology as a service. Microsoft manages the infrastructure. …(more) Large Crowd Gains Insight into Future of Cloud Computing eWeekMost of the 30 or so sessions on Day 1 of the Cloud Computing Conference &Expo were well-attended, and the three main presentations in the lateafternoon …(more) Microsoft…

• Daily Cloud Feed - Nov 3, 2009

  daily

  3 Nov 2009 | 3:45 pm

  This post is a daily aggregation of all news links from @onsaas. This post is automatically generated everyday at 11:45PM UTC. Yahoo! Announces Open-Source Cloud Server at 4th International Cloud Computing …SYS-CON Media (press release)By Roger Strukhoff Yahoo! has made its second major Cloud Computingannouncement in five months, announcing an open-source version of itsTraffic Server at …(more) Global Organizations Choose Microsoft Cloud Applications Reuterss business communication and collaboration software delivered as a service,will be available in 15 additional countries and…

• Daily Cloud Feed - Nov 2, 2009

  daily

  2 Nov 2009 | 3:45 pm

  This post is a daily aggregation of all news links from @onsaas. This post is automatically generated everyday at 11:45PM UTC. LIVE: SMOS and Proba-2 set for launch from Plesetsk NASASpaceflight.comThe platform is small, occupying just one cubic metre and acts as a servicemodule to accommodate all the systems required for the satellite tofunction. …(more) VincentKardioGram: Making it Rain [Cloud Computing] By noreply@blogger.com (Vince)Over the horizon, we’re starting to see many clouds moving shifting over.With the city of angels moving over to Google Apps, its no surprise…

• 
  CloudAve

• Why I Cancelled My Google Apps Premier Account?

  Krishnan Subramanian

  7 Nov 2009 | 12:01 am

  Few days back, I upgraded my Google Apps Standard account to Google Apps Premier account because I needed more space and I thought it will be nice to pay for a cloud service and, in the process, get rid of the annoying ads. I was also very keen on using their Postini services and wanted to use the 10 GB space on Google Sites for some project. Plus, $50 per year per user is peanuts for the value one can get out of Google Apps premier edition. But, I cancelled my subscription in exactly two days and for a reason which could be easily dismissed as silly or amateurish.First, a little background…

• You Can’t Report to Yourself

  Derek Pilling

  6 Nov 2009 | 1:39 pm

  Everyone needs someone to report to; even VCs. This may sound strange coming from a VC. Some entrepreneurs who choose to raise venture capital have great disdain for the necessary evil of reporting to their investors. That disdain is appropriate to the extent investors are asking for mundane information that creates a reporting burden and does not add information necessary for critical board decision-making. But entrepreneurs that cross the line and don’t like to report because, well, they don’t want to report to anyone, are making a great mistake. There is no excuse for not wanting to…

• Enterprise 2.0 Caffeine: Let’s Debunk the Non-Debate

  Mark Fidelman

  6 Nov 2009 | 8:17 am

  We can’t be everyone’s friend.  Dennis Howlett has written another anti-Enterprise 2.0 whopper calling the subject vague and wrapped up in marketing spin.  And he’s right.  He surfaces a lot of great points that we in the industry need to take note. Although we’d all like to treat him as the enemy I suggest we look to him as the industry’s Devils Advocate.  Not the Al Pacino version in the movie with the same title, but guy who argues for the sake of arguing.  You know who I am talking about. So let’s remove our collective hands from around his neck and…

• Causes Leaves MySpace for FaceBook

  Dan Morrill

  6 Nov 2009 | 6:39 am

  Causes is a social networking donation platform that uses MySpace so that people can raise money for causes or issues that they believe in. Generally these kinds of activities help provide a community around issues like Breast Cancer, or stop smoking, or other issues that are part of our daily life. Causes is an excellent application that makes the process of raising and donating money for a specific cause very easy and embeddable into someone’s MySpace page. Last night according to ReadWriteWeb and Stanford Social Innovation Review, Causes has sent an e-mail out to all their MySpace…

• Spammers start trying out jokes to sell stuff

  Dan Morrill

  6 Nov 2009 | 6:39 am

  Most of us at least look at our spam queues on our systems on a semi-regular basis, what is always interesting is to see the variances in tactics that spammers are using to try to get their stuff into your system. This time it is all about jokes, ones my kids would like. There is nothing wrong with a good joke – and spammers seem to have caught onto the idea that burying their ads under jokes might just work – odds are also highly likely that it does. As a tactic this would work for some people who do not pay good attention to spammers and what they are doing or how they vary their…

• 
  ElasticVapor - Life in the cloud

• The Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) for Collaborative Open Cloud Standards

  enomaly

  6 Nov 2009 | 12:10 pm

  As 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…

• Transient Ambiance: The London Underground

  enomaly

  6 Nov 2009 | 11:23 am

  As many of you know lately I've spent a lot of time away from home, traveling the world telling everybody and anybody who cares to listen about the opportunities for "The Cloud". In the coming weeks as I continue to cover most of the globe from Asia to the Middle East. I thought I'd try something new. Think of this as a kind of travel soundlog. An ambient audio diary of my various adventures.To start things off, below is the first in what I hope will be many of these. I'm calling this new feature Transient Ambiance, The mood evoked by my ever changing environment.When I recorded this entry…

• ISO Forms Group for Cloud Computing Standards

  enomaly

  6 Nov 2009 | 10:09 am

  Big news on the Cloud Standards front, I was just informed that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) - JTC 1 have formed a new Subcommittee (SC) at their Plenary last week that includes working groups for SOA and Web Services as well as a Study Group for standardization of cloud computing. (This information has not yet been made public, my source has indicated that I am allowed to share this)The scope will include Standardization for interoperable Distributed Application Platform and services including Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Cloud Computing.

• What Comes After The Cloud?

  enomaly

  26 Oct 2009 | 7:09 pm

  Lately I seem to feel like that 80's Rock Band that had that one big hit, doomed to play the same song night after night. In my case I happened to stumble upon this thing called Cloud Computing a little earlier then most. Over the last 6 years or so I've watched as the concept of outsourced web centric IT go from a fringe concept to an overly hyped, albeit under adopted buzz word. I've watched just about anything with the word "cloud" attached to it take off.When I speak at conferences my presentations have shifted from "what is" or "how does" to "where do we go from here?" It seems that…

• Google Liberates Your Docs

  enomaly

  26 Oct 2009 | 4:11 pm

  In a note to the CCIF list, Sam Johnston informed us that Google too has continued on its promise to liberate our data as part of their Data Liberation Front project. This latest Google effort introduces a new feature that makes it much easier to get your content back out of the Cloud using a tool that lets Google Doc's users easily "Convert, Zip and Download."It's interesting to note that both Microsoft and Google released completing "open" initiatives today with Mircrosoft announcing they are opening the PST format for Outlook. It's great to see both companies actively battling it out for…

• 
  IT Management and Cloud Blog

• I Ain’t That Pretty, But I Sure Can Dance - Devopsdays 2009

  johnwillis

  4 Nov 2009 | 2:08 pm

  Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud presentation at Devopsdays 09 For more pictures see …

• Overheard: Cloud Computing - Learn It Or Lose

  johnwillis

  4 Nov 2009 | 12:59 pm

  An interview I did with Jim Ericson of Information Management… You’ve built up quite a bit of content blogging about the cloud at your site johnmwillis.com in just a short time. I’ve been doing IT work for 30 years, including a lot with IBM Tivoli, but I’ve been focused on the cloud stuff for two years. I was lucky to meet some of the real pioneers in this space who gave me a kind of baptism, and since I’d been working with large corporations all my life, I completely got the idea. I started interviewing those same people when just a few of us were out there having this…

• ControlTier - Automated Provisioning and Deployment

  johnwillis

  28 Oct 2009 | 10:57 am

• BotchagalupeMarks for October 16th - 07:47

  John

  16 Oct 2009 | 10:00 pm

  These are my links for October 16th from 07:47 to 07:50: Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective - This is a guest post by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, a on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup that helps online businesses measure, manage, and monetize better. He was previously a venture capital analyst and currently serves as an advisor to several New York startups. Robert blogs at The Metric System and can be followed on Twitter at @RJMetrics.This is a guest post by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, a…

• Cloud Camp Atlanta and NoSqlEast

  John

  13 Oct 2009 | 6:15 am

  In little over a week we have two great conferences scheduled for Atlanta.   We have planned on running the second Cloud Camp Atlanta on Wednesday 10/28/2009 and then over the next two days the first NoSqlEast conference on 10/29-10/30.  The idea is to get two exciting crowds to mingle.  Brad Anderson @boorad has done an outstanding job getting some the most exciting thought leaders in cloud computing to come to Atlanta to talk about “Big Data” or the new type of “storage” in his NoSqlEast conference.  Over at our good old Cloud Camp ,we will be talking about all…

• 
  Software as Services

• Microsoft cuts BPOS price to squeeze Lotus

  Phil Wainewright

  5 Nov 2009 | 2:13 am

  While 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

  Phil Wainewright

  29 Oct 2009 | 8:14 pm

  Speaking 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

  Phil Wainewright

  22 Oct 2009 | 6:41 am

  Today, 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

  Phil Wainewright

  20 Oct 2009 | 4:14 am

  Today 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…

• Beware the allure of Fool's Cloud

  Phil Wainewright

  19 Oct 2009 | 4:57 am

  Even more insidious than the perils of Amateur Cloud (which I covered in my last post) is the allure of a phenomenon I’m calling Fool’s Cloud. The more familiar name by which this is known to many enterprises and IT vendors is ‘private cloud.’ It’s what happens when people look at the phenomenon of cloud computing, latch on to a few of its features, and implement something within their IT infrastructure that appears identical in their eyes, even though it omits some of the most crucial elements of cloud computing. I’m not saying that privately-hosted cloud…

• 
  Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog

• The informavore in its cage

  6 Nov 2009 | 6:35 am

  Edge 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 am

  Google 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....

• "The Shallows": publication details

  28 Oct 2009 | 6:58 am

  I've completed my next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and the manuscript - actually, the wordprocessingscript - is with the publisher, W. W. Norton, for editing and production. (The cover image below is provisional. It will be used in the publisher's catalog, but probably won't be the actual cover of the book.) The Shallows is slated to be published in North America on June 1, 2010, and if you're antsy you can preorder a copy from Amazon today. The English version of the book will also be published in the UK by Atlantic Books,...

• The eternal conference call

  12 Oct 2009 | 9:45 am

  What goes around comes around, if always a little faster. Remember when we first started using email, back in the foggy depths of the twentieth century? The great thing about email, everyone said and everyone believed, was that it was an asynchronous communications medium. (Yes, that's how we used to talk.) Email cured the perceived shortcomings of telephone calls, which dominated our work lives. The ring of your phone would butt into whatever you happened to be doing at that moment, and you had no choice but to answer the damn thing (it might be your boss or your client,...

• Cloud koan

  1 Oct 2009 | 7:34 am

  Not everything will move into the cloud, but the cloud will move into everything....

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  TechCrunchIT

• Twitter Comes To The ADC Market

  David Diaz

  5 Nov 2009 | 11:17 am

  Crescendo Networks, a maker of Application Delivery Controller (ADC) products built to improve server efficiency, will announce tomorrow the impending launch of their new add-on management appliance, the AppBeat SC Service Controller. The AppBeat SC Service Controller is designed to monitor multiple AppBeat application delivery controllers. This product will give users the option to be alerted via Twitter, as well as email or SNMP, if any degradation to their network is detected. As web-based properties grow and traffic increases, the need for more servers becomes apparent, and with that,…

• Search Til You Drop: Google Launches Hosted Commerce Search For Retailers

  Leena Rao

  4 Nov 2009 | 8:00 am

  Searching retail sites can be frustrating at times. While many retailers try to present product search in a visually appealing way, search can often be slow or difficult to refine. Tonight, Google is making a huge play in retail space with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites. Google offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites. Google is now entering the vertical space, by the first tailor-made enterprise product,…

• Indicee Raises $6 Million For Cloud-Based Business Intelligence Reporting Tool

  Leena Rao

  4 Nov 2009 | 8:00 am

  Business intelligence is a service that is crucial to both big and small companies. Indicee is a startup that that helps users easily combine data from their business applications and generate reports using Indicee's cloud-based service. It essentially wants to bring bring reporting and analysis to the “masses” with a cost-effective solution to mashup business data. Indicee also just completed a $6 million Series A round from Granite Ventures and Yaletown Ventures. Indicee's technology taps into data from business applications and content from productivity software such as Excel, and…

• ThoughtWorks Studios Rolls Out New Version Of Mingle, Integrates With Google Wave

  Leena Rao

  4 Nov 2009 | 7:30 am

  ThoughtWorks Studios, a software development startup, is launching a new version of its project management tool, Mingle, and is rolling out integration with Google Wave. Mingle has been upgraded to feature a communications platform within the application, called “Murmurs.” A mix of an IM and Twitter-like microblogging format, Murmurs allows anyone involved in a software project to have online conversations that are associated with a specific Mingle project.

• SwingVine Adds Real-Time Functionality To Trend Discovery Platform

  Leena Rao

  4 Nov 2009 | 2:00 am

  SwingVine, a site that lets you see what content is trending on the web, is adding real-time functionality. SwingVine aggregates data and news from across the web, analyzes the volume of online buzz and the reputation of various sources, evaluates user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the the most popular and noteworthy content on the web. It’s a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web. Adding the ability to see trends and buzz on the web in real-time…

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  All Things Distributed

• Expanding the Cloud: The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

  Werner Vogels

  27 Oct 2009 | 12:00 am

  Today 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

  Werner Vogels

  15 Sep 2009 | 10:01 am

  In 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

  Werner Vogels

  25 Aug 2009 | 11:00 pm

  At 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

  Werner Vogels

  13 Aug 2009 | 3:43 pm

  Ingrained 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…

• Amazon is in-world and hiring!

  Werner Vogels

  13 Jul 2009 | 9:20 pm

  Join recruiters and hiring managers from several of Amazon's global offices on July 14, 2009. We'll be in-world from 6am through midnight (Pacific/Seattle time) for the first ever Amazon Second Life Job Fair. This free event is a unique opportunity for candidates to have direct access to hiring managers and recruiters from around the world! We are looking across all levels of technical and non-technical profiles - from hands-on engineers to program managers and game-changing principal architects. Visit our U.S. career site at www.amazon.com/careers for open U.S. positions and links to our…

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  Cloud Musings by Kevin L. Jackson

• Navy CIO Discusses Cloud Computing

  6 Nov 2009 | 4:00 am

  During 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…

• DoD, DHS and FBI Highlight Identity Management Interoperability

  25 Oct 2009 | 1:00 pm

  During this week's Federal Executive Forum, key decision makers from DoD, DHS and FBI highlighted identity management interoperability as their key priority for 2010. Panelist included:Robert Mocny, Acting Director, US-VISIT Program Department of Homeland Security;Stephen Morris, Criminal Justice Information Services Division, FBI; andThomas Dee, Director, Defense Biometrics, Office of the Secretary of DefenseIn fulfilling his responsibility for provide policy and programmatic oversight on DoD biometric programs, Mr. Dee indicated that his priority was to institutionalize proven identity…

• EuroCloud Launches !!

  21 Oct 2009 | 5:32 pm

  Congratulations to Pierre-Jose Billotte for the successful launch of EuroCloud !!Established as a pan European network, EuroCloud are communities that represent a knowledgeable network of companies engaged local and European activities related to SaaS and cloud computing. The network is organized in two tiers with a national level (France, Spain, England, Belgium, etc.) and a European level. The national level focuses on local topics while the European level addresses European topics,under the EuroCloud brand (or another if appropriate in a national setting). Only companies who have an…

• Government Cloud Economics

  16 Oct 2009 | 7:11 pm

  In the The Economics of Cloud Computing, Gwen Morton and Ted Alford have published an EXCELLENT economic evaluation of the federal government's push to cloud computing. Anyone interested in this market should definitely read it, analyse it, and believe it !! The conclusion acknowledges the value of cloud computing, but also offers these practical considerations:It will take, on average, 18-24 months for most agencies to redirect funding to support this transition, given the budget process.Some up-front investment will be required, even for agencies seeking to take advantage of public cloud…

• Deputy CIA CIO Newest Ulitzer Author

  13 Oct 2009 | 12:06 pm

  Jill Tummler Singer, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is now a Ulitzer author. Appointed in November 2006, Ms Singer is responsible for ensuring CIA has the information, technology, and infrastructure necessary to effectively execute its missions. Prior to her appointment as Deputy CIO, she served as the Director of the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service (DTS), United States Department of State, and was responsible for global network services to US foreign missions. Speaking at the recent GovIT Expo in Washington DC, Ms Singer highlighted cloud…

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  ARCHIMEDIUS

• The Real Time Infrastructure Ultimatum

  gregness

  5 Nov 2009 | 4:27 pm

  For 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

  gregness

  22 Oct 2009 | 4:31 pm

  A 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

  gregness

  13 Oct 2009 | 2:14 pm

  As 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?

  gregness

  30 Sep 2009 | 4:11 pm

  In 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 [...]

• Networks and Moving Data Centers

  gregness

  28 Sep 2009 | 5:17 pm

  As Cisco, HP, Juniper, F5, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others circle the data center field of battle, one strategic ridge of high ground is in network automation, or the ability to move (or adjust/provision) IT assets at the push of a button without the need for extensive manual intervention.   That manual intervention accounts for a [...]

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  Fountainhead

• Infrastructure 2.0 – A Virtual Analogy

  Ken Oestreich

  27 Oct 2009 | 11:09 pm

  Is 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

  Ken Oestreich

  6 Oct 2009 | 8:30 am

  One 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

  Ken Oestreich

  29 Sep 2009 | 3:47 pm

  I 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"

  Ken Oestreich

  22 Sep 2009 | 2:38 pm

  Back 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,…

• An Ideal Datacenter-in-a-Box, Part II

  Ken Oestreich

  14 Sep 2009 | 8:45 am

  Last week I posted a Blog outlining Dell & Egenera's latest Datacenter-in-a-Box offering. More than one person took note of how I compared its simplicity in contrast to other offerings in the same space, but failed to detail the specifics of Egenera's PAN Manager software and how it mapped to 13 common IT Service Management functions.The 13 different functions are mapped onto the data center "stack" at right. They span management of both physical and virtual software, servers, I/O, networking, etc. -- as well as higher-level functions such as High-Availability and Disaster Recovery.The…

• 
  Cloudy Times

• Swarm: Distributed Computation in the Cloud

  Markus Klems

  11 Oct 2009 | 4:04 pm

  Ian Clarke, former lead developer of Freenet, is working on a cool project, named Swarm. The key question that inspired Swarm is: how to distribute data and computation across multiple computers such that the programmer need not think about it? Based on Scala 2.8, Swarm draws upon the programming language feature “portable & delimited continuations“, i.e. the capability of migrating a piece of a thread to a different computer (“move the computation, not the data“). The promise: let the programming framework handle the distribution problem, instead of having the…

• GSA Cloud

  Markus Klems

  17 Sep 2009 | 12:45 pm

  Funny thing I came across recently: Web-shop for GSA cloud computing apps & services. They have a shopping cart! :) According to Wikipedia: The General Services Administration (GSA) is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. The GSA supplies products and communications for U.S. government offices, provides transportation and office space to federal employees, and develops government-wide cost-minimizing policies, among other management tasks. Its stated mission is to “help…

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

  Markus Klems

  26 Aug 2009 | 4:50 pm

  AWS Virtual Private Cloud Amazon Web Services today announced a new feature (in limited beta): Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). You can create a VPC that allows secure EC2 integration into existing IP network infrastructure. Assign private IPv4 addresses to the VPC in an address space between /28 and /18 (16 to ~16,000 IPs). The VPC can be partitioned into up to 20 subnets. The term “private” of VPC refers to the the usage of IPsec. Integration is done with a gateway at the edge of the VPC that can be connected to an existing VPN. Future The setup enables end-to-end network security…

• New Mechanism to Clean your Mobile Device

  Markus Klems

  22 Aug 2009 | 2:20 pm

  Recently, my friend Abraham and I developed a prototype and filed a utility patent for a cleaning mechanism for mobile devices. The mechanism is integrated into the box that is used to carry the device, such as a belt pouch. Prototype iPhone bag Update: New prototype (9/29/2009) Both protect and clean your mobile device We came up with the idea when we noticed that touchscreen devices, such as digital cameras, iPhone, etc. become dirty quickly due to grease spots and finger prints on the touchscreen surface. Currently available bags and boxes only have limited support for cleaning mechanisms,…

• Amazon Export

  Markus Klems

  14 Aug 2009 | 3:45 pm

  Amazon Import/Export Amazon Web Services physical data transfer (Amazon Import/Export) allows cloud users to ship storage volumes to Amazon data centers and upload the data into S3. Now, Amazon Export allows users to get their data back via physical data transfer. Off-Site Backup & Disaster Recovery The service resembles traditional Disaster Recovery (DR) offerings where a customer sends storage volumes (disk or tape) with backup data to an off-site data center managed by a DR service provider, such as EMC, SunGard, etc. Fighting Bandwidth Limitations Amazon Import/Export is especially…

• 
  SmoothSpan Blog

• Podcast: From Soviet Era CRM Command and Control to Social CRM

  smoothspan

  20 Oct 2009 | 7:43 am

  I 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

  smoothspan

  12 Sep 2009 | 12:56 pm

  Recently 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

  smoothspan

  9 Sep 2009 | 8:03 am

  A 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?

  smoothspan

  3 Sep 2009 | 7:55 am

  The 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…

• Customer Service Segmentation in a Social World

  smoothspan

  25 Aug 2009 | 8:27 am

  Esteban Kolsky writes a great account of Paul Greenberg’s keynote for CRMe09.  By all means, give it a read to get a sense.  Paul has always done a fabulous job of boiling down what’s really important whenever he writes or talks about CRM. The part that caught my attention was the discussion of segmentation.  It was only a short paragraph, so I’ll repeat it here: First, Paul rightly mentioned how each of us want to personalize the experiences, and expect the organization to deliver that. The solution is not to personalize on a one-by-one basis but rather to use…

• 
  CLOUD COMPUTING NEWS - Google News

• Cloud computing, virtualization proponents getting antsy - San Francisco Chronicle

  6 Nov 2009 | 7:31 pm

  Cloud computing, virtualization proponents getting antsySan Francisco Chronicle(11-06) 09:59 PST -- While many organizations have only begun down the cloud computing and virtualization roads in the past few years, some in the industry and more »

• Savvis to Participate in Cloud Computing Panel Discussion at Goldman Sachs ... - CNNMoney.com (press release)

  6 Nov 2009 | 2:51 pm

  Savvis to Participate in Cloud Computing Panel Discussion at Goldman Sachs CNNMoney.com (press release)The panel discussion will focus on cloud computing services and some of the related technology shifts. A webcast will be available at the investor relations successfactors Vice President of Cloud Computing to Discuss 'Managing and Reutersall 40 news articles »

• Major players form cloud coalition, challenge traditional hardware vendors - SearchCloudComputing.com

  6 Nov 2009 | 7:51 am

  SYS-CON Media (press release)Major players form cloud coalition, challenge traditional hardware vendorsSearchCloudComputing.comApparently directed at providing assistance to the country's electronic firms in developing cloud computing products and services, its value remains to be IBM Woos Developers With Cloud OfferingsChannel InsiderIBM launches test and development products for cloud computingSearchSOAIBM Introduces New Offerings for Software Development in the CloudReutersPC World -ChinaTechNews.com -InformationWeekall 58 news articles »

• NI Technology Identifies Investment Opportunities in Cloud Computing - CNNMoney.com (press release)

  6 Nov 2009 | 6:39 am

  NI Technology Identifies Investment Opportunities in Cloud ComputingCNNMoney.com (press release)To take advantage of this offer, please visit the following link: -- How does "cloud computing," now the domain of companies like Google, have its roots in Investment Opportunities in Cloud ComputingSYS-CON Media (press release)all 9 news articles »

• Microsoft sees Taiwan as key cloud computing development center - Digitimes

  6 Nov 2009 | 1:42 am

  DigitimesMicrosoft sees Taiwan as key cloud computing development centerDigitimesIt appears that Microsoft is using this same business model to promote its cloud computing initiatives. Microsoft has announced that it is cooperating with Microsoft In Cloud Computing Deal With Taiwan Gov't, FirmAHNChunghwa and Microsoft sign cloud MOUCommsDayMicrosoft, Taiwan Sign MOU On Cloud Computing Research HubWall Street JournalNew York Times -NetworkWorld.com -Comtex Smartrendall 94 news articles »

• 
  Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal

• BioSciences Firm Goes Live With CloudCraze

  6 Nov 2009 | 9:54 am

  EDL Consulting, a leading technology services firm today announced that LI-COR Bioscience’s biotech reagents and consumables and environmental products are now available online in the Cloud via EDL’s CloudCraze eCommerce application. read more

• Biosciences Firm Goes Live With CloudCraze Framework

  5 Nov 2009 | 8:03 am

  EDL Consulting announced that LI-COR Bioscience's biotech reagents and consumables and environmental products are now available online in the Cloud via EDL's CloudCraze eCommerce application. Using the Force.com cloud computing development platform, CloudCraze offers an efficient way to manage the LI-COR eCommerce site for academic, commercial, and pharmaceutical research teams looking for novel ways to advance the discovery process. CloudCraze is the first eCommerce application to be listed on the Salesforce.com AppExchange.read more

• Virtual Computing, Archiving and IDM at Educause 2009

  5 Nov 2009 | 7:15 am

  Versatile's broad expertise in architecting and deploying large scale virtual systems in both the data center and at the desktop are on display at this event. Event attendees will be able to have hands on experience with these technologies including key Versatile technology and engage with Versatile's management. In addition, Versatile will participate in the presentation of Fedora Commons, a solution for storing, managing, and accessing digital content in the form of digital objects. Versatile will also be supporting Duquesne University's presentation of their MultiPass 2.0 application.

• Security and Compliance in the Cloud

  4 Nov 2009 | 4:30 pm

  Terry Woloszyn, Founder of PerspecSys, emphasized security and compliance in his session at the 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Nov. 2 – 4. In his session – “Addressing Data Privacy, Residency, and Security when Adopting Cloud Applications” - focused on new technologies and techniques that allow sensitive data to appear to be in the cloud, but really remain behind the enterprise firewall. Woloszyn emphasized that “there should be a segregation of the data and the functionality. All the business sensitive date should be…

• Cisco Reports First Quarter Earnings

  4 Nov 2009 | 2:00 pm

  Commenting on the quarter, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Chambers noted, "Building off what we saw as a clear tipping point in Q4, our Q1 results continued to reflect strong sequential growth trends that meet or exceed expectations during normal economic times. We view the improving economic outlook, combined with solid execution on our growth strategy, as creating unparalleled opportunity to drive more value into the core of the network. Simply said, we believe that key market transitions across collaboration, virtualization and video will drive productivity and growth in network…

• 
  CLOUD COMPUTING blogs - Google News

• Pervasive data protection in the corporate cloud - Computerworld

  6 Nov 2009 | 12:08 pm

  Pervasive data protection in the corporate cloudComputerworldThe advent of cloud computing and service-oriented data protection has begun to mutate the traditional role of backup administrator.

• Google Dashboard Enhances Privacy Control - InformationWeek

  6 Nov 2009 | 12:07 pm

  PC WorldGoogle Dashboard Enhances Privacy ControlInformationWeekMicrosoft's announcement took the form of a policy paper that said the company's established privacy principles would apply to cloud computing and called Google lets users control what it knows about themStrategyEye (subscription)Google's new Dashboard sure would tie in nicely to Android, Chrome OSDownloadsquad (blog)Google privacy controls: Most people won't careCNET Newsall 529 news articles »

• Intel's James Reinders on parallelism - Part 2 - CNET News

  6 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am

  Intel's James Reinders on parallelism - Part 2CNET NewsHere, in Part 2, we move on to cloud computing, functional and dynamic languages, and what needs to happen with computer science education.

• Ossur Hf: Changes in Major shareholdings - SYS-CON Media (press release)

  6 Nov 2009 | 4:35 am

  Ossur Hf: Changes in Major shareholdingsSYS-CON Media (press release) Keynote at the third and last day of the 4th Cloud Computing International Conference Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Company Profile for Arbitech, LLCSYS-CON Media (press release)all 17 news articles »

• Phase2 International joins Apps.gov storefront - FederalNewsRadio.com

  5 Nov 2009 | 2:05 pm

  Ad-Hoc-News (Pressemitteilung)Phase2 International joins Apps.gov storefrontFederalNewsRadio.comThey've now recently launched the Apps.gov storefront, and the federal government is now actively promoting the use of these cloud computing and The State of Cloud Computing in JapanThe Industry Standardall 28 news articles »

• 
  GoGrid Blog

• Interviews at Sys-Con Cloud Computing Expo ‘09: f5 Networks and GoGrid

  Michael Sheehan

  5 Nov 2009 | 2:27 pm

  I had the pleasure of not only attending the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, CA this week, staffing the booth and generally enjoying talking to a wide range of developers, technologists, vendors, partners and others, but I also was able to do a couple of interviews with Peter Silva, Technical Marketing Manager of f5 Networks. If you don’t already know, free f5 load balancing has been built in to GoGrid since its launch in March 2008. Below are pair of interviews that appear here as well as on the f5 DevCentral site. We hope you enjoy them! First is the one with Peter as…

• CNN Copies GoGrid’s “Cloud Computing Explained” Video?

  Michael Sheehan

  5 Nov 2009 | 10:03 am

  I came across an interesting article in the CNN Tech section of CNN titled “A trip into the secret, online ‘cloud’” written by John Sutter. The article itself, takes a unique approach as the author “searches” for his data in the “cloud.” As Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm points out, the goal of the article is to “explain cloud computing to the masses” however, she continues by saying that the premise behind the CNN article is not quite on target. The example that is given in the article is that of uploading a picture to an image sharing site like Flickr or Picasa, and that…

• Come Visit GoGrid at Sys-Con’s Cloud Computing Expo – Nov 2-4, 2009 in Santa Clara, CA

  Michael Sheehan

  30 Oct 2009 | 7:38 am

  Sys-Con’s 4th International Cloud Computing Expo is next Mon-Weds (11/2/09-11/4/09) and GoGrid is exhibiting there. Come join the thousands of registered users who will be attending this event at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA  as it promises to be information-packed about the Cloud and all of its benefits. Keynote speakers are: Richard Marcello (President, Systems & Technology, Unisys) – “The Time is Right for Enterprise Cloud Computing” Shelton Shugar (SVP Cloud Computing, Yahoo) – “Accelerating Innovation with Cloud…

• Intel’s Latest Generation Microarchitecture, Codenamed “Nehalem” to Power GoGrid Cloud

  Michael Sheehan

  23 Oct 2009 | 2:05 pm

  GoGrid is “suping up” its CPU architecture. Within the next few months, we will be rolling out new infrastructure using next-generation Intel microarchitecture, specifically the Nehalem 5500 line. Recently, we have been running a series of internal tests as we evaluate Intel’s new multi-core performance as enabled within these CPU chipsets. Nehalem & GoGrid I spent some time with Telemachus Luu, GoGrid’s Director of Business Strategy, and a senior-level GoGrid cloud architect in order to better understand what this means to GoGrid and its customers. I won’t…

• 9 out of 10 Startups Fail! Learn Why They Do & How to Avoid those Failures at FailCon’09

  Michael Sheehan

  21 Oct 2009 | 7:20 am

  GoGrid is pleased to be a sponsor of this year’s FailCon 2009 which is a 1 day conference where you can find out how NOT to be one of those nine companies that fail when starting up. FailCon is a forum where you can ask those questions you were always afraid to ask, and the people giving the answers are successful founders, investors, designers and developers. GoGrid is offering a 25% discount on tickets to FailCon so read on! It’s not easy being an entrepreneur and it is practically impossible to be a SUCCESSFUL one. In fact, having some battle scars from a failure or two will…

• 
  Spouting Shite

• antispam and antivirus resellers wanted!

  Ross Cooney

  4 Nov 2009 | 4:39 am

  Since 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

  Ross Cooney

  3 Nov 2009 | 5:23 am

  Downtime 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

  Ross Cooney

  24 Oct 2009 | 3:24 am

  Yes, 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

  Ross Cooney

  18 Sep 2009 | 3:20 am

  Dave 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…

• My week on the Sunderland Software City Blog

  Ross Cooney

  10 Sep 2009 | 5:46 am

  During the first week of September I was asked to act as the ‘blogger in residence’ at Sunderland Software City. This involved a commitment to write a blog post every day for a week on the ‘trials and tribulations’ of running a small business in the software sector. Sunderland Software City is a new initiative, based in the North East of England, designed to inspire and encourage the growth of the Software Industry in the region, and to make the area an attractive location of choice for software businesses. My posts are here: Today is catchup Monday A insight into how…

• 
  Inside Enterprise IT

• Betfair Places its Odds on Dell With Windows 7

  DELL-Kathy B

  5 Nov 2009 | 7:02 am

  Last week we experienced one of the most significant and exciting launches from Microsoft… the release of Windows 7! As part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP), Dell consultants worked with a number of customers during their testing and implementation of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. At Betfair– home of the world’s biggest betting community – robust IT is crucial. Staff at the firm process six million transactions every day; that’s more than the combined total of the European stock markets. Security and high availability are…

• Virtualization Déjà Vu

  Dell-Jennifer G

  4 Nov 2009 | 8:15 am

  I remember riding in the car which a bunch of teenagers a few months ago when the Seether song “Careless Whisper” came on the radio. They loved it - so edgy, such a great sound. Ugh, really?  Had they never heard of Wham?  George Michael? I’d like to forget the 80s sometimes, too, but please. How could those kids think that song was an original? Don’t even get me started about Limp Bizkit covering “Faith” … blasphemy. It happens in music, and it happens in IT -- and it appears to have happened this week. The recent VCE announcement from…

• Learning About Cloud Storage From Nirvanix’s Geoff Tudor

  DELL-Barton G

  29 Oct 2009 | 5:00 am

  On Friday I grabbed lunch with Geoff Tudor, SVP of business development and co-founder of Nirvanix .  After they cleared the plates I talked to Geoff about what Nirvanix does and where he saw cloud storage heading.   (Please visit the site to view this media) Some of the topics Geoff tackles: Providing cloud storage for the enterprise from five data centers around the world that are pooled and presented as one large global file server. The Nirvanix “secret sauce”: the file virtualization layer that sits on top of pooled/virtualized commodity storage. How Nirvanix’s…

• Windows 7 Arrives for Large Enterprise Customers - What Is Your Migration Plan?

  DELL-Bruce Eric

  28 Oct 2009 | 5:00 am

  The day that many of us have been waiting for has come: the official launch of Microsoft Windows 7 and general availability (GA) for consumer customers. What this means is that PC manufacturers like Dell can begin shipping systems with Windows 7 on them. Of course, large corporations and other enterprises have had beta programs in place for some time now so last week's announcement was very much focused on consumers' use of Windows 7. Microsoft hosted events in New York and elsewhere, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself spent more than five minutes with Matt Lauer on The Today…

• Gartner’s Bittman: Private Cloud’s Value as Stepping Stone

  DELL-Barton G

  27 Oct 2009 | 2:38 pm

  Yesterday Gartner distinguished analyst Tom Bittman, who covers cloud computing and virtualization,  posted some thoughts and observations from the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. Private Cloud-o-maina Based on Tom’s observations, private cloud (however defined) seems to have captured the hearts and minds of IT.  Before he began his talk on virtualiztion he did a quick poll asking how many in the audience considered private cloud computing to be a core strategy of theirs.  75% raised their hands.  While not overly scientific, that’s a pretty big number. Little…

• 
  Perspectives

• One Size Does Not Fit All

  James Hamilton

  3 Nov 2009 | 6:11 am

  Last 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…

• The Cost of Latency

  James Hamilton

  31 Oct 2009 | 8:39 am

  Recently I came across Steve Souder's Velocity 2009 presentation: High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Loading Pages. Steve is an excellent speaker and the author of two important web performance books: ·         High Performance Web Sites ·         Even Faster Web Sites   The reason this presentation caught my interest is it focused on 1) why web sites are slow, 2) what to do about it, and 3) the economics of why you should care. Looking first at the economic argument for faster web sites, many…

• Relational Database Service, More Memory, and Lower Prices

  James Hamilton

  27 Oct 2009 | 7:38 am

  I’ve worked on our around relational database systems for more than 20 years. And, although I freely admit that perfectly good applications can, and often are, written without using a relational database system, it’s simply amazing how many of world’s commercial applications depend upon them. Relational database offerings continue to be the dominant storage choice for applications with a need for structured storage.   There are many alternatives, some of which are very good. ISAMs like Berkeley DB. Simple key value stores.  Distributed Hash Tables.  There are many…

• Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009

  James Hamilton

  26 Oct 2009 | 2:09 pm

  I’ve attached below my rough notes from Andy Bechtolsheim’s talk this morning at High Performance Transactions Systems 2009. The agenda for HPTS 2009 is up at: http://www.hpts.ws/agenda.html.   Andy is a founder of Sun Microsystems and of Arista Networks and is an incredibly gifted hardware designer. He’s consistently able to innovate and push the design limits while delivering reliable systems that really do work.  It was an excellent talk. Unfortunately, he’s not planning to post the slides so you’ll have to make do with my rough notes below.  …

• Stanford Clean Slate CTO Summit

  James Hamilton

  24 Oct 2009 | 12:56 pm

  I attended the Stanford Clean Slate CTO Summit last week. It was a great event organized by Guru Parulkar. Here’s the agenda:   12:00: State of Clean Slate -- Nick McKeown, Stanford 12:30:00pm: Software defined data center networking -- Martin Casado, Nicira 1:00: Role of OpenFlow in data center networking -- Stephen Stuart, Google 2:30: Data center networks are in my way -- James Hamilton, Amazon 3:00: Virtualization and Data Center Networking -- Simon Crosby, Citrix 3:30:RAMCloud: Scalable Datacenter Storage Entirely in DRAM  -- John Ousterhout, Stanford 4:00: L2.5: …

• 
  Virtualization.com

• Siemens Strikes Partnership With VMware

  Robin Wauters

  6 Nov 2009 | 4:39 am

  Siemens IT Solutions and Services has concluded a new partnership agreement with VMware to deliver innovative virtualization solutions to the marketplace. The agreement between Siemens IT Solutions and Services and VMware includes developing new offers and implementing a common marketing and sales strategy, and will allow joint customer acquisition. VMware was a key partner with Siemens in its... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• Xen Community Sets Forth Self-Evaluation Metrics (Project Golden Ratio)

  Robin Wauters

  6 Nov 2009 | 4:38 am

  Project Golden Ratio (inspiration) is a new project - PDF - within the Xen.org community to determine a set of metrics that allow the community to measure and evaluate itself. These set of metrics will allow the community to find areas of strength and weakness in an overall effort to improve community participation, growth, and success. As with all things open source, Project Golden Ratio will... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• Syncsort Announces New Services For Physical-to-Virtual Server Migration

  Robin Wauters

  6 Nov 2009 | 4:37 am

  Syncsort, maker of high-performance data processing, data integration and data protection and recovery software, has announced a new professional services offering for organizations who are planning to deploy server virtualization. Syncsort's MVP (Migration, Verification and Protection) service is performed by technical specialists who help plan, manage, verify and rapidly deploy... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• Server Technology Introduces Solutions for Powering Cisco’s Unified Computing System

  Robin Wauters

  6 Nov 2009 | 4:35 am

  Server Technology, announces the release of a series of application notes created to help design engineers, application engineers and data center managers power Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS). These application notes illustrate how to power and provide redundancy for Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis and 6120XP 20-Port Fabric Interconnects in multiple configurations using Smart Cabinet... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• F5 Debuts New Management Pack Solution for Microsoft Windows-based Virtualization

  Robin Wauters

  4 Nov 2009 | 4:18 pm

  F5 Networks today announced a new F5 Management Pack solution for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that allows joint F5 and Microsoft customers to dynamically manage application delivery in virtual environments. F5 also updated its Application Ready Solution portfolio to support Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• 
  Data Center Knowledge

• Fortune Gets LEED Gold in San Jose

  Rich Miller

  6 Nov 2009 | 9:17 am

  The Fortune Data Centers facility in San Jose, Calif. has earned LEED Gold status. Fortune Data Centers has earned Gold certification for its San Jose, Calif. data center under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program for energy-efficient buildings. The facility is among a handful of LEED Gold data centers, and Fortune believes it is the first multi-tenant data center to receive Gold Certification for all of its usable tenant space. “With data centers expending enormous amounts of energy to power and cool servers and IT infrastructure, we’re challenging the…

• Internap Expands Seattle Data Center

  Rich Miller

  6 Nov 2009 | 8:50 am

  Internap Network Services (INAP) said Thursday that it will expand its data center in Seattle as part of a broader effort to shift more of its colocation business from partner data centers into facilities owned by Internap. The Seattle expansion is expected to cost $22 million, or nearly half of the $50 million Internap has earmarked for its data center expansion. The project will add 15,000 net sellable square feet of capacity to Internap’s current footprint in Seattle, with the new space expected to open during the third quarter of 2010. “Seattle was a compelling choice for…

• Earnings: Cisco, SGI, Limelight, Internap

  John Rath

  6 Nov 2009 | 6:33 am

  Here’s a roundup of quarterly financial results announcements this week: Cisco reports first quarter 2010 Earnings.  Cisco reported first quarter results Wednesday for the period ended October 24, 2009.  Net Sales were $9 billion in the first quarter, a decrease of 13% year over year.  CEO John Chambers noted that the fourth quarter of 2009 was a clear tipping point and first quarter 2010 results continued to reflect strong sequential growth trends. Chambers also said “a new model of productivity based on collaboration is clearly emerging and we believe this may be the most…

• Data Center Jobs: Uptime Institute

  Rich Miller

  6 Nov 2009 | 3:30 am

  At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Uptime Institute Professional Services, which is seeking a Senior Consultant. This position will be responsible for working with data center owners, operators, engineers, and client senior management to provide mission critical environment consulting related to facility infrastructure. Click here for more information or to apply. Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our RSS feed.

• Facebook Goes Green with New Data Centers

  Rich Miller

  5 Nov 2009 | 1:37 pm

  The breakout growth of Facebook is turning out to be an economic stimulus plan for data center landlords. And the fast-growing social network’s infrastructure isn’t just getting bigger, it’s getting greener.  Facebook has confirmed that it has leased additional data center space in San Jose, Calif. in a new facility operated by Fortune Data Centers. This is the fourth data center expansion of 2009 for Facebook, which has signed two leases for additional data center space in Virginia and two more in Silicon Valley. All LEED Gold Data Centers All four of the leases…

• 
  Nati Shalom's Blog

• Is Your Data Really Secured?

  Nati Shalom

  25 Oct 2009 | 6:37 am

  Security 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

  Nati Shalom

  14 Oct 2009 | 4:05 am

  I 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

  Nati Shalom

  1 Oct 2009 | 8:30 am

  Once 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

  Nati Shalom

  30 Sep 2009 | 10:36 pm

  Two 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…

• The Interactive Cloud (Part II - Adding Operational Awareness to your Application)

  Nati Shalom

  11 Sep 2009 | 8:33 am

  In part I of of this topic, I covered the general concept and motivation behind the "Interactive Cloud". I described how the interactive cloud enables applications to be managed in a similar way to the way we run our business. In this post, I discuss further details of what it means to add operational awareness to the application. To do that, I refer to our specific experience in GigaSpaces. Towards the end of the post, I point out specific code snippets as an illustration of that model. Background GigaSpaces 7.0 Application Cluster Management API is an API for managing application clusters,…

• 
  Appistry Blog

• Appistry Positioned as a Visionary in Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers

  Shannon Prager

  29 Oct 2009 | 3:26 pm

  Gartner, 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!

  Shannon Prager

  28 Oct 2009 | 2:46 pm

  Please 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

  Shannon Prager

  15 Oct 2009 | 2:23 pm

  Appistry 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?

  Sam

  9 Oct 2009 | 7:00 am

  It’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.

• Appistry takes another step forward to simplify cloud computing for the enterprise

  Shannon Prager

  6 Oct 2009 | 12:32 pm

  Hopefully you all got a chance to see our news announcement this morning. Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4.1 Further Simplifies Enterprise Cloud Computing The Latest version of Appistry’s leading cloud application platform simplifies support for cross-datacenter private clouds, hybrid clouds, and the migration of multi-tier enterprise systems to the cloud Appistry, a pioneer in private cloud computing for the enterprise, today announced the availability of the latest version of its leading cloud application platform – Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4.1. Enhancements to the platform expand support…

• 
  Blog Joyent

• 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 ...

• Joyent and Yahoo! Launch Free Developer Program

  Joyent is very excited to partner with Yahoo! to create its newest Free Developer Program! Joyent is offering developers a Launch Accelerator optimized for the Yahoo! Application Platform free for one year! The Yahoo! Application Platform allows you to reach our users and improve the Yahoo! user experience by building and ...

• Read/Write Load Balancing for MySQL with ZXTM in the Joyent Cloud

  Update: Rescheduled: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 Register Here! Join us for this informative technical webinar with Raja Srinivasan - Zeus Technology, Rod Boothby - Joyent, and Jimmy Guerrero - Sun Microsystems, where we will explore how to load balance MySQL in the Joyent Public Cloud with ZXTM. When implementing a scale out architecture ...

• Webinar: Innovative Tools Being Used in the Cloud to Improve Security

  Date & Time 30 Sep 2009 5:00pm PT Register Here Description: During this web cast you will learn about some of the most innovative tools being used in the cloud to manage security. You will also find how the cloud is changing the business models for traditional software and network appliances so that customers ...

• 
  Blog Joyent

• 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 ...

• Joyent and Yahoo! Launch Free Developer Program

  Joyent is very excited to partner with Yahoo! to create its newest Free Developer Program! Joyent is offering developers a Launch Accelerator optimized for the Yahoo! Application Platform free for one year! The Yahoo! Application Platform allows you to reach our users and improve the Yahoo! user experience by building and ...

• Read/Write Load Balancing for MySQL with ZXTM in the Joyent Cloud

  Update: Rescheduled: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 Register Here! Join us for this informative technical webinar with Raja Srinivasan - Zeus Technology, Rod Boothby - Joyent, and Jimmy Guerrero - Sun Microsystems, where we will explore how to load balance MySQL in the Joyent Public Cloud with ZXTM. When implementing a scale out architecture ...

• Webinar: Innovative Tools Being Used in the Cloud to Improve Security

  Date & Time 30 Sep 2009 5:00pm PT Register Here Description: During this web cast you will learn about some of the most innovative tools being used in the cloud to manage security. You will also find how the cloud is changing the business models for traditional software and network appliances so that customers ...

• 
  Thinking Out Cloud

• Amazon Reserved Instances Update

  Geva Perry

  16 Oct 2009 | 11:26 am

  Back 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

  Geva Perry

  16 Oct 2009 | 8:35 am

  The 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

  Geva Perry

  15 Oct 2009 | 10:28 pm

  My 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…

• The Purpose-Driven Cloud: Part 3 - Domain-Specific Clouds

  Geva Perry

  6 Oct 2009 | 3:01 am

  This is the third post in the series I described in The Purpose-Driven Cloud. the series is an attempt to categorize the various cloud platforms available today (and that may be available in the future). Each installment examines one of the dimensions that differentiates various cloud platforms. Previous posts discussed the Usability-Driven Cloud and Framework-Based Clouds. This post is about: -Domain-Specific CloudsUnlike general purpose clouds, such as IaaS clouds (for example, Amazon Web Services) and PaaS clouds (e.g., Google App Engine), domain-specific clouds are cloud platforms…

• The Clouderati on Twitter

  Geva Perry

  21 Sep 2009 | 12:55 am

  I did not follow the Twitter stream on this in real time, but I understand that James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart) proposed creating a list of people who tweet about Cloud Computing and Sam Johnston (@samj) implemented it using TweepML.org. It's a convenient way to find out who tweets about cloud and follow them in bulk.I created a list like this a while ago, but haven't had time to update it properly, so a community driven list makes a lot of sense. The list is relatively short right now, but seems to be growing quickly via recommendations.You can check it out here. And follow @clouderati.(And…

• 
  Delicious/awsbuzz

• Nortel: News Releases: Nortel Provides On-Demand Access to Cloud-Based Real-Time Applications

  awsbuzz

  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."

• Cerebral Mastication » Blog Archive » Using Amazon EC2 to Thwart Crappy Internal IT Services

  awsbuzz

  4 Nov 2009 | 6:20 am

  "What are the top ways Amazon EC2 can allow a business user to escape the manipulative and counterproductive grip of corporate IT? Well I’m glad you asked!"

• Analyzing Human Genomes with Hadoop » Cloudera Hadoop & Big Data Blog

  awsbuzz

  1 Nov 2009 | 9:23 am

  "This is a compelling result from both a users and a systems perspective: it is an accurate, fast, and cheap way of squeezing 1000 hours of computation into an afternoon, all made possible with MapReduce/Hadoop."

• Generating Custom Map Tiles Rapidly in the Cloud | Development Seed

  awsbuzz

  1 Nov 2009 | 6:57 am

  "With the help of Amazon Web Services, we’re building an infrastructure capable of generating beautiful interactive maps quickly. We’re using four Amazon services in this workflow: SQS (job queuing), EC2 (tile generation), S3 (storage), and CloudFront (distribution). The figure below illustrates the design."

• Amazon RDS and Django • Blog Archive • Lonely Code

  awsbuzz

  30 Oct 2009 | 10:54 pm

  "Now RDS is actually completely compatible with all mySQL tools, so interfacing it with django is stupid simple - but, for those that want a quick walkthrough, I’ve prepared one below, from getting the service running to getting django to use it:"

• 
  Amazon Web Services Blog

• New EC2 High-Memory Instances

  AWS Evangelist

  27 Oct 2009 | 12:00 am

  In many cases, scaling out (by launching additional instances) is the best way to bring additional CPU processing power and memory to bear on a problem, while also distributing network traffic across multiple NICs (Network Interface Controllers). Certain workloads, however, are better supported by scaling up with a more capacious instance. Examples of these workloads include commercial and open source relational databases, mid-tier caches such as memcache, and media rendering. To enable further scaling up for these workloads, we are introducing a new family of memory-heavy EC2 instances with…

• Amazon EC2 - Now an Even Better Value

  AWS Evangelist

  26 Oct 2009 | 11:59 pm

  Effective November 1, 2009, the following per-hour prices will be in effect for Amazon EC2:   US EU   Linux Windows SQL Linux Windows SQL m1.small $0.085 $0.12   $0.095 $0.13   m1.large $0.34 $0.48 $1.08 $0.38 $0.52 $1.12 m1.xlarge $0.68 $0.96 $1.56 $0.76 $1.04 $1.64 c1.medium $0.17 $0.29   $0.19 $0.31 c1.xlarge $0.68 $1.16 $2.36 $0.76 $1.24 $2.44 This represents a reduction of up to 15% from the current prices for Linux instances and is a direct result of our policy of working non-stop to drive our operating costs down for the benefit of our customers. This does…

• Introducing Amazon RDS - The Amazon Relational Database Service

  AWS Evangelist

  26 Oct 2009 | 11:56 pm

  We are always looking for ways to make it faster, simpler, and more fun to develop applications of all types. Every hour that you don't spend fiddling with hardware, tracing cables, installing operating systems or managing databases is an hour that you can spend on the unique and value-added aspects of your application. Today I'd like to tell you about our newest service, the Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS for short. Now in beta, RDS makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without…

• New Public Data Set: YRI Trio

  AWS Evangelist

  19 Oct 2009 | 12:52 pm

  The YRI Trio Public Data Set provides complete genome sequence data for three Yoruba individuals from Ibadan, Nigeria, which represent the first human genomes sequenced using Illumina’s next generation Sequence-by-Synthesis technology. This data represents some of the first individual human genomes to be sequenced and peer-reviewed (the full story is here). This article contains full information about this remarkable and ground-breaking effort. The data is described as "containing paired 35-based reads of over 30x average depth." Basically this means that the data contains a large…

• AWS Workshops in Beijing, Bangalore and Chennai

  AWS Evangelist

  18 Oct 2009 | 2:36 pm

  I will be in China and India starting next week. Apart from other meetings and presentations to user group, this time, I will be taking up 3-hour workshops. These workshops are targeted at architects and technical decision makers and attendees will get a chance to play with core AWS infrastructure services.If you are a System Integrator or Independent Software Vendor, Enterprise Architect or a entrepreneur, this will be a great opportunity to meet and learn more about AWS.Seats are limited and prior registration is required:AWS Workshop in BeijingOct 24th : http://sd2china.csdn.net(in…

• 
  Cloudscaling

• On Second Thought…How Big Is AWS Really?

  Andy Schroepfer

  27 Oct 2009 | 11:11 am

  We are trying something new at Cloudscaling and inviting a few of the more interesting cloud computing bloggers to provide some alternative viewpoints.  We thought we would start with Andy Schroepfer. His additional analysis of AWS revenue is thoughtful and worth consideration.  –Randy Bias, Founder and Cloud Strategist, Cloudscaling Guest Author Andy Schroepfer is VP of Strategy at Rackspace. You can follow Andy’s content on www.NoMoreServers.com and via Twitter @shrepfur. Determining the exact revenue size of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) unit is akin to finding the exact…

• State of the Cloud – Cloud Camp in the Clouds

  randybias

  23 Oct 2009 | 6:17 pm

  I recently gave a short, 5-minute ‘lightning talk’ at Cloud Camp in the Clouds.  This is the first ‘virtual’ (online) event for the Cloud Camp folks.  I want to particularly thank the organizers Reuven Cohen, Dave Nielsen, and Sam Charrington for allowing me to give our perspective and also to let us tee up the entire event as the first presenter.  A recording of the entire event is in the works, but I wanted to reproduce my presentation here to get it out sooner. So here is a recreation of the talk including my original deck, which has my fonts (the perfectionist…

• Amazon’s EC2 Generating 220M+ Annually

  randybias

  1 Oct 2009 | 8:00 am

  Today I’m going to tell you how much revenue Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is generating. After all, you, my regular readers, come to this blog for its insight, original thinking, and gems of wisdom. Today I have something particularly juicy for you: real-world numbers on Amazon’s EC2 size and revenue. Recently Ruv Cohen talked about how cloud computing is taking off and Guy Rosen made an attempt to derive EC2 usage information. What I have today is actual verified EC2 numbers plus some guesses and a rough model of it’s current annual usage. Not only do I have a…

• Cloud Standards are Misunderstood

  randybias

  29 Sep 2009 | 8:06 am

  Create them now and stifle innovation or create them later when it’s too late? That seems to be the breadth of the discussion on cloud standards today. Fortunately, the situation with cloud computing standards is not actually this muddy. In spite of the passionate arguments, the reality is that we need cloud standards both today and tomorrow. In this posting I’ll explore the cloud standards landscape. Thousands of Different Standards Earlier this year was one of the first attempts at getting folks together to talk about cloud standards at the January Cloud Interop Session (an…

• VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

  randybias

  15 Sep 2009 | 8:00 am

  More and more it’s becoming apparent that VMware and Amazon are headed for a serious collision.  Amazon is eager to capture more of the enterprise business market, VMware’s bread and butter.  Meanwhile, VMware is actively supporting a new crop of Amazon competitors with its recent vCloud Express release.  More importantly, what perhaps neither have realized or, at least as far I can tell Amazon hasn’t realized, is that the battle isn’t ultimately about so-called ‘public’ or ‘private’ clouds[1], but about standards, de facto or otherwise.

• 
  Tags @ alan.blog-city.com

• Amazon takes MySQL to the cloud; or have they?

  Alan Williamson

  27 Oct 2009 | 2:43 am

  Amazon 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"

  Alan Williamson

  11 Oct 2009 | 9:35 am

  Engadget 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

  Alan Williamson

  24 Sep 2009 | 2:36 am

  Amazon 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

  Alan Williamson

  6 Sep 2009 | 9:21 am

  Amazon 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

  Alan Williamson

  31 Aug 2009 | 9:20 am

  A 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!

• 
  Nubeblog

• Las charlas sobre Virtualizacion y Cloud del MadridOnRails

  Diego Parrilla

  22 Oct 2009 | 2:50 am

  Ayer 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

  Diego Parrilla

  14 Oct 2009 | 11:47 pm

  El 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 /…

• Sidekick y cómo suicidarte en La Nube

  Diego Parrilla

  14 Oct 2009 | 7:01 am

  Ha sido una de las noticias más comentadas de los últimos tiempos alrededor del Cloud Computing: Los usuarios de Sidekick, un dispositivo similar a la Blackberry muy popular en los USA han perdido todos sus datos y hay muy pocas posibildades de recuperarlos.  Acojonante Acongojante.  Sidekick almacenaba los datos en local y en ‘La Nube’, es decir, en almacenamiento en sus Centros Datos donde se suponía que gestionaban los datos de sus usuarios. La historia de esta empresa es curiosa. Hace cosa de un año Danger fue comprada por Microsoft por unos $500M.  No quiero imaginarme…

• Mañana martes de visita en el nuevo SIMO Network

  Diego Parrilla

  21 Sep 2009 | 3:29 pm

  Mañana martes y el miércoles me pasaré por el SIMO Network. Creo que este año no hay go-gos ni azafatas, por lo que ha perdido parte de su atractivo </ironic_mode>. Sin embargo, parece que lo han orientado a que los profesionales podamos conocernos cara a cara. Especialmente la gente que trabajamos en TI nos hemos acostumbrado a las relaciones por correo, conferencias, mensajería instantánea, webminars… haciendo un poco irrelevante dónde estamos o con quién hablamos. Así que poder charlar con otro profesional directamente se agradece. Mañana martes se hablará del Cloud…

• Hemos liberado Abicloud 0.8.0

  Diego Parrilla

  18 Sep 2009 | 1:10 am

  Aunque es difícil que yo sepa algún día lo que es el dolor del parto, creo que liberar esta versión debe aproximarse bastante Aunque ya lo hemos anunciado en el blog oficial de Abiquo, me gustaría hacer una reseña especial debido a la liberación de la versión 0.8.0 de Abicloud. Como ya habéis leido en otras ocasiones, Abicloud es una plataforma de código abierto que permite el despliegue de manera sencilla de una infraestructura Cloud Computing. Los usuarios finales pueden crear, gestionar y escalar arquitecturas complejas de IT gracias a nuestra interfaz de usuario. La url para su…

• 
  Haut Tec

• SaaS: Agile, Marketing & the Wheel of Death

  Michael Dunham

  30 Oct 2009 | 11:40 am

  In 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

  Michael Dunham

  21 Oct 2009 | 12:33 pm

  SaaS 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

  Michael Dunham

  9 Oct 2009 | 12:17 pm

  In 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…

• SaaS: 10 Ways to Fail – Part 1

  Michael Dunham

  8 Oct 2009 | 7:18 pm

  They say everybody likes lists. Miles of virtual paper have been inked in pursuit of the “best recipes for chocolate chip cookies,” the “worst airline food,” and to complete the theme – the best diet plans. Ok then- we’ve got a list: Ten Ways to Fail as a SaaS Company Introduction This little list comes from reading some recent blog entries like the post our friend Abe Sultan of Apprenda wrote for Datamation – How to Fail Miserably as a SaaS Company and my own conversations with software company executives. Before anybody says it – it is not…

• Haut Tech Conversations: Pricing Subscription Services – How?

  Michael Dunham

  31 Aug 2009 | 3:22 pm

  Pricing services – how do you do it? Is there a rational process? Can you tie it to value? Cost? Developing a price is one of trickiest parts putting a new service online. Prospective customers have to believe the value can be realized and existing customers must find the value exceeds the subscription. A monthly subscription is easier for prospects to swallow but a yearly provides a bigger hit for cash flow and maybe higher retention. Which is better in the long run? These are just some of the issues facing services vendors in the growing SaaS and cloud services market. In our…

• 
  BlueLock

• Making the Connection between Private Clouds and Public Clouds

  6 Nov 2009 | 9:39 am

  Charles Babcock recently wrote an article entitled, “Hybrid Clouds Floating to Enterprise Forefront” which ran in InformationWeek.  He attended the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, where speakers raised the prospect of private clouds working with public clouds, creating hybrid clouds.The hybrid cloud is not a term we’ve never seen or heard before.  However, it seems in his article that there aren’t many providers out there actually doing the hybrid cloud approach with their clients.  But BlueLock is. For over two years BlueLock has offered a…

• Test/Dev Clouds in High Demand

  6 Nov 2009 | 9:39 am

  I love my job. As a client specialist at BlueLock, I get to spend the majority of my time working with the innovative companies that are producing the products and services of the future and, at the same time, pushing the limits of cloud computing hosting. In all of my conversations with BlueLock clients, one thing is clear: There is massive demand for a cloud computing platform, specifically for testing and development, that is cost-effective and integrates well with production environments. Many businesses have data and processing that doesn't require a fully-managed cloud hosting service…

• My Top Ten Favorite Blog Posts

  3 Nov 2009 | 7:22 am

  Just last week I wrote a post on the top ten most viewed blog posts from the BlueLock Blog.  Granted, they were all great blog posts, but it didn’t really give me the ability to post my favorites.  Here is a list of my all-time favorite blog posts from the BlueLock Blog.  Let me know if I missed your favorite!1.    Cloud Computing – a five-layer model  2.    Going green in your data center  3.    Seven things you should know about cloud computing 4.    Fuzzy math in the cloud – TCO of cloud…

• Cloud Computing goes to the Cars

  30 Oct 2009 | 6:47 am

  Cloud computing is getting some traction with Ford Motor Company, with the help of some students.  Ford recently created a project in which they have tapped the University of Michigan to help bring cloud computing and social networking to Sync, the in-car connectivity and communications-and-entertainment system.Students at the University of Michigan are granted access to a developmental operating system in which they are able to develop and test programs to greater explore cloud computing capabilities between cars and the outside world.  Sync was originally developed with Microsoft…

• Already Prepping for CloudCamp Cincinnati in February

  29 Oct 2009 | 5:55 am

  After a great success at CloudCamp Indy #2 on Tuesday we've already started planning CloudCamp Cincinnati.  Lucky for us Brian Prince of Microsoft, who presented a Lightning Talk at CloudCamp Indy offered up the MS headquarters in Cinci.  Eager to host the event, he's already got it booked for February 24th.  Mark your calendars now, this should be a good one! Haven't been to a CloudCamp and not sure what you're missing?  Read this post and/or watch this video.  MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR CLOUDCAMP CINCINNATI: 2/24/2010 from 4PM to 8PM

• 
  Cassatt Data Center Dialog

• Fumble! What not to do at a cloud computing conference

  Jay Fry

  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

  Jay Fry

  27 Oct 2009 | 9:07 pm

  I 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

  Jay Fry

  21 Oct 2009 | 8:01 pm

  Is 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

• Running with scissors? Or maybe trimming the risks out of virtualization instead

  Jay Fry

  14 Oct 2009 | 10:07 pm

  What's riskier: standing at the top of a hill in a thunderstorm while holding a golf club...or commuting to work? Skydiving...or flying to Pamplona and then taking part in the Running of the Bulls? OK, now for the really tough one: juggling knives...or implementing virtualization in production?Before you answer, you should be warned that humans are quite bad at assessing relative risks. TIME

• BusinessWeek's Hamm: Recession harms Silicon Valley's ability to contribute, but helps cloud computing

  Jay Fry

  5 Oct 2009 | 9:13 pm

  Believe it or not, there are still people who get paid to watch and report on the ins and outs of Silicon Valley. They see a lot of what's going on and probably think that those of us in the business are alternately drivers of a pretty interesting part of the global economy -- and in need of therapy. (Example? How about Larry Ellison's most recent anti-cloud computing rant and the flurry of

• 
  The 2.0 Life

• 15 Ways Facebook Can Get You an A+

  David Pierce

  6 Nov 2009 | 3:55 am

  This 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…

• How to Make Facebook Even More Useful

  David Pierce

  2 Nov 2009 | 9:18 am

  Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter Facebook, with more than 300 million users, is now the third-largest country in the world. That’s nuts. It increasingly seems that Facebook is the first, and often last, stop for many people navigating their social spheres, doing everything from keeping in touch to planning events. It’s an excellent social network, and developers are turning into much, much more through applications, APIs, Facebook Connect, and more. But  it’s still not a perfect tool. There are lots of little things about Facebook that could be improved, and luckily for us,…

• Penzu’s the Place for Journaling Online

  David Pierce

  28 Oct 2009 | 9:18 am

  Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter Over the course of my life, I’ve probably started a journal about 850,000 times. Every time something monumental happens, or I go on a cool trip, I start a journal, and keep it for a little while. Then, life either gets boring, busy, or both, and I give up. What I’ve realized recently, though, is that the reason I’ve never stuck to a journal is that it takes so long. In order to write legibly – and it’s debatable if that’s even possible – I have to write stupidly slow, and it takes me about 4 days to write a journal entry that says “had…

• A Few New Things at The 2.0 Life

  David Pierce

  25 Oct 2009 | 10:00 pm

  I really need to get over this whole “I have to constantly be tweaking something, all the time, always” thing. But sometimes, it comes out pretty well. If you haven’t noticed, there’s a brand-new look at The 2.0 Life. I’ve been redesigning and tweaking for a while now, trying to figure out how to get the best of the blogging-style designs, along with a more attractive and easier way to find better content. And I think I’ve found some good stuff. (If you’re reading in RSS, here’s the link to the new design) Here’s what you need to know…

• 6 Tricks to a Highly Productive Me

  David Pierce

  21 Oct 2009 | 4:25 am

  Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter In fairness, this has nothing to do with the topic of this site. But it’s been so helpful and meaningful in my life recently that I figured I’d share. I’ve got way too much to do, and not nearly enough time in which to do it. Know the feeling? I’ve spent the last couple of months taking on new thing after new thing. I’ve been interviewing for jobs, writing for my school newspaper, working with a  PR company, freelance writing, writing and editing my blog, and working on a pretty awesome new project for and by students, creating a space and…

• 
  George Reese on O'Reilly Broadcast

• Your Cloud Needs a Sys Admin

  George Reese

  15 Oct 2009 | 2:35 pm

  I've attended a number of CloudCamps around the world, and the question as to whether systems administrators are relevant in the post-cloud world always seems to come up. Let's put this silly question to bed: your cloud needs a sys admin. A mature IT ecosystem has both systems administrators and developers. The cloud has a nasty habit of deluding programmers into thinking they no longer need sys admins.

• Four Tips for Avoiding VM Sprawl in the Public Cloud

  George Reese

  3 Oct 2009 | 3:36 pm

  You moved into the cloud to save some money. Now it's the first of the month and you're looking at your latest cloud provider bill. It's not at all what you planned. How can than be? You probably did a solid ROI analysis and it clearly indicated that a cloud infrastructure was going to save you money. Welcome to the dark side of cloud computing--the world of VM sprawl. Newcomers to the cloud generally find it very easy to start up servers but very hard to shut them down. The result is a cloud infrastructure with an unfortunate number of pointless servers.

• The Dasein Cloud API

  George Reese

  15 Aug 2009 | 8:36 am

  The Dasein Cloud API is the next step in the drive towards Open cloud programming standards. If you want to support multiple clouds or if you simply want to support the possibility of switching cloud providers, you are faced with supporting different programming models. This Open Source API enables programmers to write cloud management applications in Java against a single API that supports multiple clouds.

• Freemium Services and the Economics of Social Networking

  George Reese

  5 Jul 2009 | 12:21 pm

  Social networking sites face a unique economic challenge when it comes to monetizing the value they create. Any attempt to capture a piece of the value they create inevitably damages that value.

• The First Step into the Cloud: Which Kinds of Applications Make the Most Sense?

  George Reese

  23 Jun 2009 | 6:22 pm

  A key to successfully integrating the public cloud into your IT infrastructure is identifying a first application that will provide you with measurable results and learnings that can apply to future deployments without putting your business at risk. IT annoyances make the ideal first cloud projects.

• 
  Data Center Networks

• Every cloud needs a net

  kenovak@cisco.com

  6 Nov 2009 | 1:12 pm

  Most 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 ?

  kenovak@cisco.com

  3 Nov 2009 | 4:11 pm

  You 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

  kenovak@cisco.com

  29 Oct 2009 | 6:09 pm

  I 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…

• Could the Converged Network Adapter be the most important element in a Unified Fabric?

  kenovak@cisco.com

  23 Oct 2009 | 9:07 am

  Many vendors are touting the benefits of IEEE DCB, FCoE, CEE, DCE, Unified Fabrics, and many other marketing monikers for equipment consolidation.  Each component of the technology is interesting, but maybe no more so than the Converged Network Adapter itself.   Why so?  Let’s take a look.

• Cisco Nexus 4001I Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter

  kenovak@cisco.com

  20 Oct 2009 | 5:27 pm

  On my previous blog post “What exactly is a Nexus 4000?” there were many questions/comments around OEM blade server vendors and details of Nexus 4000 Series Blade Switches . Today, IBM announced the details of the Cisco Nexus 4000 blade switch for their BladeCenter H and HT chassis. Nexus 4001 Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter will provide the support for Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and the emerging IEEE Data Center Bridging (DCB) standards over 10 GbE for IBM Blade servers. So IBM becomes the first blade server vendor to make Cisco Nexus 4000 available for…

• 
  Daily AWS Wtf

• SimpleDB gotcha

  28 Oct 2009 | 1:58 am

  While 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 am

  Today 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 am

  During 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 am

  I’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…

• Amazon Web Services and the EU

  25 Sep 2009 | 2:55 am

  Just recently Amazon gave us European EC2 customers a well-deserved feature update. We got CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling. As an added bonus we also finally got SimpleDB access, which means less lag and no traffic costs when using SimpleDB from a European EC2 instance. Let me take that hook to talk about Amazon Web Services and the EU. That’s right, today’s Wtf is not technical, at least not on the surface. It’s about the simple fact, that us Europeans are stuck waiting for new services and new features until Amazon feels like they’re ready for us to use after US…

• 
  Sam Johnston

• HOWTO: Fix OS X by uninstalling Adobe Flash

  Sam Johnston

  30 Oct 2009 | 6:27 am

  Adobe 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

  Sam Johnston

  27 Oct 2009 | 10:17 am

  Following 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?

  Sam Johnston

  27 Oct 2009 | 5:21 am

  What'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?

  Sam Johnston

  12 Oct 2009 | 4:50 pm

  As 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

  Sam Johnston

  12 Oct 2009 | 5:32 am

  Having 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…

• 
  Cloud Computing News and Resources - onCloudComputing

• Deloitte poll reveals that 60.9 percent believe cloud computing will be a transformative technology in the industry

  hone

  5 Nov 2009 | 12:52 pm

  A majority of executives polled by Deloitte (60.9 percent) believe cloud computing will be a transformative technology in the industry and can drive financial benefits, or at least be useful for certain kinds of enterprise services. The executives were polled recently during the Deloitte webcast, “Cloud Computing in the Enterprise: Not If, But When and How?” Cloud computing enthusiasm was somewhat tempered by executives’ concern over security and privacy, as 34.6 percent cited these issues as the largest considerations for adopting cloud computing in their organizations. In…

• Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com announces Timing of Its Third Quarter Fiscal 2010 Financial Results Conference Call

  hone

  4 Nov 2009 | 9:06 am

  Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced that its third quarter fiscal 2010 results will be released on Tuesday, November 17, 2009, after the close of the market. The company will host a conference call at 2:00 PM (PT) / 5:00 PM (ET) to discuss the financial results with the investment community. A live web broadcast of the event will be available on the salesforce.com Investor Relations website at http://www.salesforce.com/investor. A live dial-in is available domestically at 866-901-SFDC or 866-901-7332 and internationally at 706-902-1764. A replay will be…

• Distributed database for cloud computing users, Objectivity, Inc. Named Amazon Web Services Solutions Provider

  hone

  4 Nov 2009 | 8:20 am

  Objectivity, Inc., the leading distributed database for cloud computing users, announced today that it has been selected by Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, as an AWS Solution Provider. With this distinction, Objectivity is recognized as an organization that helps customers to fully leverage the benefits of the AWS infrastructure. Objectivity garnered attention from AWS after making a free 60-day evaluation of its flagship product, Objectivity/DB, available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The launch made Objectivity/DB the first federated, distributed database…

• Cluster, grid and cloud management software Platform Computing expands cloud computing capabilities

  hone

  4 Nov 2009 | 7:54 am

  Platform Computing, the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, is expanding cloud computing capabilities for high performance computing (HPC) with two new offerings. The company today announced the release of Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster, a product that dynamically changes the operating systems and personalities of compute nodes managed by Platform LSF and Platform Symphony.  It effectively increases application capacity and resource utilization by consolidating heterogeneous application clusters and allows organizations to build an internal cloud for HPC.  Platform…

• IBM launches IBM Cloud Academy

  hone

  4 Nov 2009 | 7:42 am

  IBM  today launched the IBM Cloud Academy, a global forum for educators, researchers and information technology (IT) personnel from the education industry to pursue cloud computing initiatives, develop skills and share best practices for reducing operating costs while improving quality and access to education. IBM announced at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference that 17 educational institutions worldwide are the first to participate in the Cloud Academy. United States-based institutions include George Mason University; Georgia State University; Gwinnett County Public Schools; Marist College; New…

• 
  In(tegrate) the Clouds

• If It’s Not Multitenant, It’s Not Really SaaS

  dcunni

  6 Nov 2009 | 2:19 pm

  Last year Gartner came out with a SaaS revenue forecast that made the following statement: “It is important to differentiate SaaS from hosting or application management or application outsourcing. Because the SaaS/on-demand market is ‘hot’, many suppliers are rebranding their hosting or application management or application outsourcing capabilities as SaaS/on-demand. The core proposition behind SaaS/on-demand is the delivery of multi-tenant service from a remote location over an internet protocol (IP) network via a subscription-based outsourcing contract.” If…

• Salesforce to PeachTree Integration

  dcunni

  6 Nov 2009 | 9:10 am

  Here’s a quick video of Salesforce to PeachTree integration. It’s been a while since I’ve seen PeachTree from Sage. I’m interested in why organizations are using it these days. Strengths / weaknesses?

• Cloud Futures: Marc Benioff CEO of Salesforce.com at Google Atmosphere

  dcunni

  5 Nov 2009 | 1:32 pm

  To get a sense of what’s in store at Dreamforce 2009, here’s Marc Benioff presenting at Google’s Atomsphere. (BTW, how many times do you think he’s presented the Safe Harbor slide?) “Grab the Cloud brass ring and run with it!” “It’s a marriage, it’s not a one night stand!”  

• Customer Master Data Integration: Microsoft Access and Salesforce.com

  dcunni

  4 Nov 2009 | 8:26 am

  Recently I wrote about some of the most common use cases I’ve seen for Salesforce application and data integration. One of the most common is customer master data synchronization. Here’s a common scenario: You have Account and Contact customer master data sitting in a legacy Microsoft Access-based CRM system and you need to load it into the Contact object in salesforce.com (welcome to the cloud!) You need to quickly and easily connect to the Microsoft Access data and Salesforce. Data must be transformed before it’s loaded into Salesforce. Contacts and must be linked to the…

• Salesforce Integration Customer Success

  dcunni

  30 Oct 2009 | 9:18 am

  Earlier this week I posted some of the more typical use cases I’ve seen for data integration as a service, specifically for salesforce.com customers. I want take a moment to highlight some of the amazing Salesforce customer feedback we’ve seen over the last few week for the AppExchange data synchronization service: You check out all of the AppExchange reviews here and learn more about the multitenant Data Synchronization Service here.