June 24, 2011 Off

Census Bureau Takes to the Cloud

By David
Grazed from Destination CRM.  Author: Brittany Farb.

The U.S. government was dealing with a lot of data during the 2010 Census—and that’s an understatement. Even before a count of 308,745,538 people was reached, the Census Bureau knew it needed a system to gather and organize an overwhelming mass of information.

After Acumen Solutions had demonstrated its cloud-based solution to the Census Bureau in 2008, Acumen was enlisted to develop a custom Salesforce.com CRM application. With only 12 weeks until the go live date, Acumen was responsible for the largest cloud implementations in the federal government.

June 24, 2011 Off

Cloud Computing: the Economic Problem

By David
Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Tim Worstall.

Cloud computing is the next big thing in the computing world. But there’s a small little economic problem that needs solving.

The idea that we can all put everything into the cloud and then access it from anywhere is quite delightful. Hard drive failures become someone else’s problem for a start. But a part of the story is that bandwidth and storage elsewhere is cheaper than storage locally. Yes, of course there’s more to it than just costs but as we all know, costs do still loom large in any business decision.

June 24, 2011 Off

Is IT Ready for True Pay-as-you-go Software Model?

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Ann All.

Several months back I wrote a post about how confusing licensing terms and conditions were becoming a sticking point for adoption of cloud computing. While customers are eager to take advantage of the pay-as-you-go usage model promised in the early days of the cloud, software vendors are understandably reluctant to give up their large licensing fees and ongoing support and maintenance revenues.

 

June 24, 2011 Off

Tilera unveils 64bit cloud processor

By David
Grazed from EE Times.  Author: PR Announcement.

Tilera Corp. has released the TILE-Gx 3000 processor family that is specifically designed for designed for cloud computing applications.

Co-developed with some Internet brands, Tilera said the processors target scale out datacenters running throughput-oriented applications such as web applications, database applications like NoSQL and in-memory databases, data mining applications such as Hadoop and video transcoding…

June 24, 2011 Off

Turning infrastructures into platforms

By David
Grazed from Cloud Pro.  Author: Simon Bisson.

Clouds need to be portable, if only to give you the ability to change service provider at the end of a contract or if your current host consistently fails to meet agreed SLAs. If you’re running a private cloud in your own datacenter, portability allows you to take advantage of burst patterns, expanding into hosted services as and when business demands require additional compute capacity.

June 23, 2011 Off

Risk to cloud adoption because IT departments ‘short on time’

By David
Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Antony Savvas.

Widespread adoption of cloud computing could be threatened because IT departments do not have the time to get it off the ground, according to a report.

High maintenance costs and the increasing percentage of time that goes into administration around existing systems were the biggest challenges to overcome, said the paper.

Nearly two thirds of respondents said the volume of administrative tasks was "significantly reducing their effectiveness", and 60 percent said administration was reducing their capacity to work on new initiatives, such as cloud migrations.

June 22, 2011 Off

How to Manage Rackspace Cloud Servers

By David
Grazed from ReadWriteWeb.  Author: David Strom.

A new ebook to help users of Rackspace setup and manage their cloud-based servers is out this week. Called Managing Rackspace Cloud Servers and written by Jacek Artymiak, it is a very practical and useful guide, and seems to be unique.

The 75 page book teaches you how to use the openstack-compute Python-based tool to manage server farms built on top of the Rackspace Cloud Servers service. The author takes you through the steps to get the source code installed on your machines and illustrates some basic management tasks with copious examples and some geek humor thrown in for extra measure. Even if you aren’t familiar with Python you should be comfortable using this tool.

For example, you can use openstack-compute to resize RAM or disk on one of your VMs, rebuild a VM from a known working version, and making backups of your cloud servers.

Rackspace’s programming interfaces make automating common tasks possible, and why these Python-based tools can be useful. "Consider the following scenario: you have an nginx front-end server as a load balancer and a couple of Tornado web servers behind it servicing the incoming traffic. Suppose you get famous and the load on your web servers rises above a certain threshold," says Artymiak…

June 22, 2011 Off

ITIL struggles to catch up with private cloud

By David
Grazed from The Register.  Author: Nathan Coates.

Data centres run on the back of good operational processes that are repeatable and trusted. IT management best practices have sometimes been criticised as being monolithic and failing to keep up with change.

ITIL (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library), for example, was defined in the 1990s as a best-practice framework for large-scale UK government systems.

Is ITIL still appropriate framework for the private cloud?

The long-standing goal of data centre management the private cloud has been dynamic IT, or the allocation of IT resources on demand according to the needs of the business.