Vendor lock-in and the challenge to Platform as a Service
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Ryan Kim.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) has a bright future but one of the big concerns is vendor lock-in, which can prevent companies from making their applications portable. That’s going to be one of the big challenges for PaaS to grow, said Lucas Carlson, founder and CEO of AppFog.
Speaking on a panel at the GigaOM Structure conference Thursday, Carlson said every time a company adds a new service to an existing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, there’s the danger of getting more entwined in their services, making it harder to move…
Using a Cloud Service at the Office Without Permission? You’re Not Alone.
I don’t usually like to look too deeply into surveys of customers by one company or another, usually because they tend to arrive at some kind of self-serving point. But sometimes there’s some interesting nuggets in them that illustrate something interesting, or confirm something widely suspected but not often quantified.
The case in point is a new survey by the Texas-based cloud computing outfit Rackspace. This is the company that is the subject of constant and recurring speculation that it’s about to be acquired, with similarly constant and recurring insistence by its senior executives that it doesn’t want to be acquired.
Anyway, Rackspace conducted a survey of 500 IT decision makers who happen to work for companies that use cloud computing services. (Again I ask, rhetorically, given all the surveys they seem to be responding to from vendors, trade publications and so on, when do “IT decision makers” ever get the time do their jobs?) Among the findings are the usual bits that naturally lead one to reach positive conclusions on the part of the company who commissioned the survey: Nine out of 10 IT decision makers like cloud computing, and they prefer vendors with strong customer service but higher prices by a ratio of 3 to 1. No shockers there…
The Cloud needs a new global trade agenda to prevent economic contagion
Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Stuart Lauchlan.
Some of the fastest-growing emerging global markets are erecting new trade barriers that discriminate against foreign ICT and services – and holding back the progress of Cloud Computing.
That’s the grim conclusion of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the global software industry lobby group, in a new study that concludes that the actions of some of the new economic giants – most notably China, India and Brazil – are having what the BSA calls “a contagion effect” by encouraging other smaller markets to take similarly protectionist measures.
“The global scope of the problem poses immediate and long-term threats to the IT industry and the broader global economy,” warns the BSA. “ These threats cannot be overstated or ignored . Leading IT economies should press a concerted bilateral, multilateral, and regional effort to combat discriminatory trade barriers where they already exist and eradicate them before they spread further.”…
Risks associated with cloud computing addressed by advisory group
The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission has released a new thought paper providing guidance on applying the advisory group’s Enterprise Risk Management Integrated Framework to risks associated with cloud computing.
Released Wednesday, “Enterprise Risk Management for Cloud Computing” notes that technology research and advisory firm Gartner Inc. has estimated that cloud computing will be a $140 billion industry by 2014. But as companies look to benefit from cloud computing’s potential, they should be aware that “cloud computing entails commensurate risks,” the paper states…
Cloud Computing: Gizmox Salvages Client/Server Apps
Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.
Tel Aviv-based Gizmox says it’s figured out how to salvage all those scads of Microsoft client/server desktop apps – pointedly the enterprise ones – transform them – relatively painlessly – into secured-by-design HTML5, and move them to the web, the cloud and mobile devices all without rewriting any code or re-engineering anything.
It’s agnostic about what mobile device. It could be Apple or Android as well as the new Windows 8 stuff.
It calls its tool-base solution Instant CloudMove Transposition Studio, a name that will never fit on a marquee. But Gizmox will still know if it gets applause for the downloadable community technology preview (CTP) it’s just put out…
Cloud outage report of 13 providers reveals downtime costs
Amazon’s cloud services downtime earlier this month annoyed some AWS customers but beyond that, it raised the question of how expensive cloud outage downtime can be.
This week, a study group called the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) released its first Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing report. The working group was formed in March by two Paris-based higher educational institutions, Telecom ParisTech and Paris 13 University.
The report’s bottom line isn’t pretty. It estimates the average unavailability of cloud services at 10 hours per year or more, while the average availability is estimated to 99.9% or less…
Red Hat’s RHEL 6.3 aims at large-scale cloud deployments
Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.
With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3, Red Hat has tweaked the enterprise grade Linux distribution to add new capabilities in storage, virtualization, security, scalability, and performance.
"This is one of largest update release to date," said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of Linux engineering development. "It has a lot of performance scalability optimizations specifically targeted at virtualized cloud deployments in the data center."
To improve overall performance, RHEL 6.3 features a new technology called NUMAD (Non-Uniform Memory Alignment Daemon [5]). NUMAD is based on ideas behind NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture), a memory management technology developed for supercomputers with large-scale distributed memory. NUMAD will align data in working memory so it is most easily accessible by the processor working on the data…
If AWS is the Walmart of cloud, is OpenStack the Soviet Union?
The stage was set for a lively debate between public cloud rivals at GigaOM Structure in San Francisco Thursday – representatives from Citrix, Eucalyptus and the OpenStack project certainly delivered. Nebula CEO and OpenStack co-founder Chris Kemp didn’t even get past the introductions before he challenged his fellow panelists on their “closed” cloud implementations and embrace of Amazon Web Services’ API, which he compared to the Walmart of infrastructure.
“It’s reasonably fast, reasonably priced and reasonably secure,” Kemp said, which is why it has the lion’s share of the cloud business today. But AWS will never be incredibly fast or incredibly secure, Kemp said, and while AWS may be emerging as a de facto standard, it doesn’t change the fact its API is proprietary. “I don’t think a de facto standard is a standard,” he said…
The Cloud Effect: A Dent In Traditional Software Pricing
Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Humayun Shahid.
Cloud computing is altogether a different realm of end-user software delivery architecture. Cloud computing is centred around the remote availability of required software applications, ensured via a streamlined, subscription-based, over-the-Web service mechanism. This particular approach enables users to acquire very specifically what is needed, and only for as long as the requirement prevails. The scheme is utterly powerful and is being endorsed by plenty of customers. Estimates by Forrester Research indicate that more than 33% of ventures rely on the Software-as-a-Service model to get some of their applications delivered. The cloud-based services market is blooming, with an expansion rate as high as 20% per annum.
In addition to the way software is made available to end users, the dawn of the cloud computing era is foreseen as an unequivocal threat to the infamous conventional software pricing model. The move to the cloud is bound to disrupt traditional software pricing, giving rise to significantly altered consumer behaviour and inherently modified operational dynamics. Making the most out of cloud computing is not all about sheer technical expertise; a significant proportion of the package deal involves getting the pricing right…
Infonetics: Data Center Equipment up 17% YoY; Fibre Channel Switch Market to Hit $2.7B by 2016, Brocade Leads
Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.
Market research firm Infonetics Research today released excerpts from 2 1st quarter (1Q12) vendor market share and forecast reports: SAN Equipment and Data Center Network Equipment.
“We see steady growth ahead for SAN switches and adapters, pushed by social networking, video sharing, data center innovations, and the eventual shift to cloud computing models. Fiber Channel continues to be the real star, with revenue from 16G Fiber Channel products growing at an astounding 52% compound annual growth rate from 2011 to 2016,” expects Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research.
Barnett adds: “The data center equipment market was down sequentially, but is up nicely from the year-ago first quarter. For the remainder of 2012 and into 2013, we expect growth to be choppy as service providers and data center operators are at different stages in their data center upgrades and some are beginning to wind down their current investment cycle.”…