In the cloud era, let’s start calling IT what it is: ‘Innovation Team’
Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, credited with transforming Big Blue IBM from legacy systems vendor into Internet systems giant, recently posted a thought-provoking piece on the new mantle IT managers and teams are assuming in the age of the cloud.
He says cloud is only the “third model” of computing to emerge in the 50-plus years IT has been in existence, following the first model, centralized computing, and the second model, client/server computing. Cloud computing is real, he says, and is needed now to integrate and manage the huge numbers of end-users and devices proliferating all over the globe. There’s no getting away from cloud…
ADVICE: Google, Microsoft or Apple: which cloud is right for you?
With all the hype surrounding cloud computing, there are been a flood of cloud-based products from Microsoft, Google and Apple that have hit the market in the last two years. They all promise to be low cost, easy to use and a convenient way to work from anywhere, but are they really all they’re cracked up to be? And if they are, how do you know which one is right for your business?
Since these services are relatively new to the mainstream business world, new features are being added on a monthly, or even weekly basis. This means that the application will change much more rapidly than a stable desktop application hosted on your machine. Patches for the desktop version of Microsoft Office come out about once a month and generally only fix vulnerabilities. Major feature and functionality updates aren’t released until the next version, so you have a couple years to settle into the program before it changes again…
Convirture Releases New Versions of Virtualization and Cloud Computing Management Software
Convirture has released updates to its ConVirt Enterprise and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud software that is used by organizations worldwide to manage virtual and cloud infrastructures based on KVM and Xen hypervisors. The updates to ConVirt Enterprise and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud include additional features that enable IT managers to effectively manage their virtual data centers, as well as usability enhancements that make the software even easier to deploy and use.
In addition to virtual machine management, ConVirt Enterprise provides advanced automation features including high availability, dynamic workload management, and backup and restore. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud delivers public, private, and hybrid cloud management, side-by-side with traditional virtualized infrastructure management…
Platform as a Service Ushers In True Private Cloud
The data center is undergoing a significant transformation. In the past 15 or so years, data center discussions have been extremely hardware-centric, but as the power of cloud computing comes to pass there is a shift towards infrastructure software. The next-generation data center will be defined by the software that coordinates all of the hardware to achieve a greater level of efficiency. In fact, all of the devices that we have will no longer be directly exposed to business applications. Instead, business applications will be cushioned from the details of hardware by a “data-center-wide operating system” known as Platform as a Service (PaaS), ushering in a true private cloud world.
The past decade of enterprise IT has been driven by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and virtualization. While these technologies have brought great value to the data center and software developers, they have not provided a universal remedy to all that ails enterprise IT strategies. Significant issues still exist, but the recent emergence of PaaS in public cloud and private PaaS as its private cloud sibling, has been touted as the newest technology to revolutionize enterprise IT…
Veddio Integrates Cloud Dashboard with ConnectWise for Unified Cloud Services Management
ConnectWise, developer of the leading service management software designed exclusively for IT service providers, VARS, ISVs and MSPs, announced today that Veddio Cloud Solutions has completed integration of its Cloud Dashboard (C.H.O.M.P.S. – Cloud-Hosting Ordering, Management and Provisioning System) with ConnectWise for more profitable provisioning and management of cloud computing for SMB clients.
Veddio’s C.H.O.M.P.S. platform provides Veddio channel partners with a unified system that allows for multi-product single location management and automatic services provisioning. The integration simplifies the quoting, provisioning and management of cloud and hosted services while giving MSPs a single, web-based interface. In addition, it makes it easier for MSPs to offer their clients a complete suite of white-labeled cloud services from a single source…
How to Avoid the Perils of Virtualization and Cloud Stall
Technologies like virtualization and cloud computing promise enormous leaps in efficiency and flexibility, but they can lead organizations into a quagmire if they don’t plan properly for the transition, says Bill Hurley, CIO, CTO and executive vice president of Westcon Group. Without proper planning, organizations can stall in the midst of their transitions to virtualized environments or the cloud, finding themselves with a bundle of sunk costs and no path forward.
Westcon Group is a value-added distributor of unified communications, network infrastructure, data center and security solutions that has made its own transition to a 100 percent virtualized environment and now helps its reseller, system integrator and service provider customers guide their own customers through the transition to virtualized environments and the cloud…
7 Ways IBM Will Make $7 Billion In Cloud
IBM in the near future will unveil a comprehensive initiative that better ties together its multi-pronged efforts to offer cloud computing services, according to one of its top cloud strategists.
It’s not just concentrating on devoting new resources to developers or more hosted services in the cloud for large enterprises, something IBM has already done for years. Rather, IBM will present customers with a broad initiative meant to help them leave behind today’s complex and inefficient data center management model and move toward a more cloud-like operation–whether a private cloud on-premise or a private cloud at an IBM data center. 
Ultimately, IBM believes many Fortune 500 cloud services users will become hybrid, public/private cloud operations, said Jim Comfort, VP of cloud offering management for IBM’s Global Technology Services. We’re not there yet by any means. But as a giant step in that direction, "many businesses are becoming service providers for themselves," Comfort said. They’re concentrating on a private cloud first, with use of public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service to follow. Consider some key parts of IBM’s plans…
GoGrid Introduces Big Data Solution
"The GoGrid cloud is about automation and allowing customers to scale efficiently," said Jeffrey Samuels, chief marketing officer, GoGrid. On Tuesday GoGrid announced the GoGrid Big Data Solution, a new offering based on a hybrid infrastructure architecture that combines the best of cloud computing with single-tenant infrastructure components – all managed through the GoGrid management portal. This solution provides businesses with maximum flexibility, choice, performance, and control. GoGrid’s new Big Data Solution is built to support high-performance analytic jobs and can be used for applications that leverage NoSQL solutions like Hadoop to serve up content via app servers.
"With the introduction of the new Big Data Solution," Samuels noted, "GoGrid provides businesses with a reliable, high-performance hybrid cloud infrastructure specifically designed for Big Data workloads in the cloud."…
7 Salient Trends and Directions in Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving field and as more enterprises join the platform, new trends are emerging. In this post, I will cover the major trends in cloud computing for the immediate future (2012-14).
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Cloud storage goes mainstream in consumer segment.
While cloud based storage services such as the Dropbox have existed for a while, they have not captured the mainstream “mom & pop” users. The problems include small storage limits (2 GB in case of free Dropbox accounts), requirement of separate apps to install, weak integration with the file systems, small size and marketing budgets of the storage companies (the maarket leader, Dropbox is still a startup) etc…
The Complex Transition to the Cloud
In June of 2008 I participated in a conference on cloud computing. After a full day of talks and discussions, the sense of the meeting was that cloud computing has the promise to bring a real paradigm shift to the IT world, although, as the conference organizer succinctly put it in his closing remarks: “There is a clear consensus that there is no real consensus on what cloud computing is.” In other words, something big and profound seems to be going on, although we are not totally sure what it is yet.
Where are we now, almost four years later? Just about everyone agrees that cloud computing is one of the major trends in IT, with important implications not only to IT but to business and society in general. Many books and articles have been written on the subject. A number of companies have cloud-based offerings in the marketplace, with more to come. But, while many of us feel that cloud is even bigger and more profound than we thought back in 2008, lots of questions remain on its intrinsic nature and its value to the business…