Will Amazon outage ding cloud confidence?
A significant Amazon Web Services outage, which took down popular sites including Heroku for hours late Thursday, shows the risk of putting too many loads in one data center. While this outage occurred in Amazon’s cloud, it wasn’t just a cloud-specific problem. It shows that building in redundancy is critical — whether your app runs in your own data center or in someone else’s cloud.
In short, AWS users should make sure their workloads run across AWS regions to prevent future snafus.
As Om reported earlier, Amazon attributed the failure to a power outage affecting its U.S. East data center in Virginia. That makes sense, US East is Amazon’s oldest and biggest data center. It suffered another major outage in April 2011 and was also beset by performance problems as Amazon rebooted thousands of EC2 instances in December…
Does Oracle Have The Most Comprehensive Cloud On Planet Earth?
The reasoning behind the question posed in the title to this article is the claim made by Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison. In a presentation to introduce his company’s latest suite of cloud computing services (See: Things All Cloudy: Oracle Takes The Inevitable Plunge), the maverick entrepreneur made the claim that, in his opinion, Oracle has “the most comprehensive cloud on planet Earth.”
Let’s take a step back and review Oracle’s journey on the cloud. Looking at Oracle today, it’s hard to believe that once Ellison had this to say about cloud computing – “What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?” However, a lot has changed over the last year and a half…
Chrome OS reviewed: The final verdict on Google’s cloud platform
Grazed from ComputerWeek. Author: JR Raphael.
Today, I’ll get my head out of the cloud.
Chrome OS ReviewI’ve spent the past two weeks, you see, using Google’s Chrome OS. I called it my Chrome OS experiment: I wanted to dive in head first and experience what it was like to live completely in Google’s cloud-centric world.
I used a combination of the new Samsung Chromebook (Series 5 550) and the new Samsung Chromebox for the bulk of my computing needs, both in the office and out. Day by day, I detailed different parts of my journey — ranging from my thoughts on the hardware to my impressions of Google’s reimagined software and what it’s really like to work with Chrome OS offline…
‘Cloud era is built on a completely different set of assumptions’
Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix Systems shares the company’s vision and strategy for powering cloud services.
Please share Citrix’s vision for powering cloud services.
The cloud era is built on a completely different set of assumptions than past generations of IT — in fact, many of the exceptions from the PC era now represent the norm in the cloud era. This is forcing enterprise IT organizations to re-evaluate IT strategies, causing them to search for lower costs, greater capacity and improved agility. Our vision for powering cloud services starts at the front of the private cloud with a single point of control that unifies the provisioning and security of Windows, web, SaaS and mobile apps through an enterprise storefront. At the back of the private cloud, a bridge to public clouds transparently enables infinite data center capacity. The third element of our cloud services focus is to enable the building of Amazon-style clouds — from bare metal servers, storage and networks to high-level software services…
Cloud providers aren’t selling the real value of the cloud
I hear this pitch all the time: "Cloud computing provides the shortest time to deploy or time to market because there is no need to purchase and configure hardware and software." That makes sense.
However, the value that comes from speedy deployments is often lost in the process that occurs in most Global 2000 companies as they allocate resources, understand compliance, and deal with security. The advantage of not purchasing hardware and software is significantly diminished, considering the amount of work required to move or create a system wherever it may be sourced. The cloud providers are emphasizing a small advantage of the cloud…
e-Signlive: Next Generation Cloud-Based Electronic Document Signing
The cloud continues to be a medium wherein software development is pushing the boundaries of end-user application consumption and experience. Not so long ago, no doubt we all remember that most software resided locally on one’s personal computer and network printing and file sharing we about the only "cloud" consumable applications on the network. Oh, alright, email too. But not much else…
Now, we find that all manner of software is either being developed from the ground up as "cloud consumable", or it is being retrofitted to accomodate this new and exciting paradigm.
One such application is eletronic document signing, otherwise known as e-signing. Not to be confused with certificate signing, e-signing is simply a means to allow organizations, technology partners, and service providers a transparent way of digitally approving electronic documents without the need for actual handwritten signatures…
Securing Cloud Data Means Recognizing Vulnerabilities
There is momentum in government now for transitioning to cloud computing. Indeed it provides many benefits: speed, agility, convenience and cost savings.
While I share the enthusiasm about the potential of cloud computing to streamline government, one issue lingers on my mind: What if the cloud providers are generally secure, but the transport of data to and from them is vulnerable?
It is true that the Internet was developed in the 1960s by the military to survive an attack. But how well protected are its pipes a half-century later? What about a decade or two or three from now, as technology evolves both for ourselves and those who wish to attack us?…
IDC Debuts Cloud Decision Framework Tool at the Cloud Leadership Forum
Worldwide public IT cloud services spending is forecast to surpass $55 billion in 2014. Yet IT leaders continue to struggle with quantifying the operational, organizational, and financial implications of their application hosting and platform decisions. To help IT decision makers to better understand their options and the associated implications as they move various enterprise workloads to the cloud, International Data Corporation (IDC) has developed a new Cloud Decision Framework Tool.
A robust tool for any IT organization wishing to more precisely evaluate its cloud computing strategy, IDC’s Cloud Decision Framework Tool officially debuted during a comprehensive, three-hour IDC analyst workshop that took place in conjunction with the IDC/IDG Cloud Leadership Forum in Santa Clara, California…
Supermicro Launches FatTwin Architecture
Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and green computing, launches the FatTwin™, a high-capacity powerful new server platform based on Supermicro’s highly successful Twin Architecture. This landmark product offers a new, flexible, high-density computing solution for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Big Data and HPC applications delivering the highest performance with the most energy efficient technologies and cooling designs available on the market.
"Energy consumption is one of the greatest challenges facing Data Centers as computing demands increase exponentially around the world," said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. "Supermicro is addressing this growing challenge by developing new generation server technologies such as FatTwin which maximizes performance with support of up to 135W processors while eliminating costly air-conditioning and cooling methods. The innovation of FatTwin is in its high-density, airflow optimized design that integrates up to eight dual-processor nodes in a standard 4U rackmount server and operates at temperatures up to 47 degrees C. Our FatTwin platform will set new industry standards for performance and efficiency while offering lowered TCO and an accelerated return on investment."…
HP and SAP: What we need is a MASHED UP cloud
The next step in cloud computing is to mash up all the different clouds hanging about with traditional IT systems to give one big mixed-up cloud, SAP and HP both insist.
Sven Denecken, SAP AG’s VP of strategy and co-innovation cloud solutions and Christian Verstraete, chief technologist of cloud strategy at HP, were sharing their companies’ cloudy visions at the Cloud Computing World Forum yesterday and seemed to come up with pretty much the same conclusions.
The hybrid cloud – or converged cloud if you’re over at HP – is the way forward, where the stuff on your desktop at work, on the internet, in your personal Dropbox and anywhere else you can think of, is all somehow melded together into one seamless UI for employees…