Author: David

October 8, 2012 Off

EC2 Instance Types – Pricing, Comparison, and our Favorites

By David

Contributed Article. Author: Eric Anderson, co-founder, CopperEgg

EC2 Instance Types – Pricing, Comparison, and our Favorites

Recently at the local Austin DevOps Meet-up, I talked about the CopperEgg EC2 infrastructure that is the back end of our server performance monitoring product. Of particular interest was the piece on a few common EC2 gotchas. One of the things I talked about is a spreadsheet we use to compare different EC2 instance sizes together to optimize the right fit for our needs.

We commonly need to adjust our infrastructure. So there are frequent questions, like "We need more memory, which size do we upgrade to from a c1.xlarge?" So, we put a spreadsheet together to help us remember some of the qualities of the different instances. It helps us translate the hourly cost to a monthly cost, and show the reserved instance cost as well.

October 8, 2012 Off

Enterprise computing IS the cloud

By David

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Oliver Marks.

The Oracle occupation of downtown San Francisco buildings is over, but the sea and air invasion continues. After painting the town red with Open World conference events, the city’s busiest events weekend (thanks to the fog free Indian summer we San Franciscans enjoy this time of year) includes lots of America’s Cup yacht racing action on the bay.

The video clip above of the defending cup holder Oracle team capsizing but subsequently going on to win Saturday’s event is a good analogy for how many enterprise software customers see all the big incumbent tech vendors in the race for future relevance. They’re heavily invested in past technologies and watching the race for any errors and where the future high ground is…

October 8, 2012 Off

Cloud Print: transforming digital Data as a Service

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Sander Nagtegaal.

Cloud print, which lets companies create digital “print” jobs from their desktops and tap into a web of connected print facilities, can save resources, money and time. And preserve the value of hard copy print for select applications, writes Peecho founder Sander Nagtegaal. Digital publishing is growing rapidly and our affinity for consuming real-time media shows no signs of stopping. Despite this, as GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram recently reported much of the content we put online is actually getting lost in a non-stop stream of information. The problem is, hard-copy print is still best for some jobs — or for some audiences.

My frustration about this led me to start Peecho, a free service that lets people turn digital content into a physical product. Peecho’s service infrastructure draws on cloud printing, a technology that helps transform digital data into printed products by tapping into networks of production facilities through the cloud. Other companies in this arena include HubCast, MagCloud, and Shapeways…

October 8, 2012 Off

Big data: Latest trend after cloud computing

By David

Grazed from Times of India. Author: Neha Madaan.

With the management of new types of data rising in priority, Indian organizations are increasingly seeing the opportunity in big data, the latest trend after cloud computing and virtualization to create a buzz in India.

A new survey by Informatica Corporation revealed that 72 per cent of Indian organizations are now considering, planning or running ‘Big Data’ projects, with organizations viewing the trend as an opportunity rather than an IT challenge by a greater than two-to-one margin in India…

October 8, 2012 Off

Does the EC’s cloud strategy go far enough?

By David

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Neil Hawley and Graham Hann.

The European Commission’s cloud computing strategy document – titled Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe – last week outlined the obstacles to the establishment of a vibrant market for cloud computing and the need for an appropriate European strategy. The main obstacles identified by the European Commission (EC) are: a lack of clarity on rights, responsibilities, and liability; insufficient data protection; and insufficient standardisation, particularly across jurisdictions.

The EC aims to develop model terms for cloud computing service level agreements (SLAs) for contracts between cloud providers and users. The action-plan recognises that even large companies have little negotiating power with cloud providers and contracts often do not provide for liability, data integrity, confidentiality or service continuity…

October 8, 2012 Off

7 reasons why Europe really matters to cloud computing

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s not home to Google, Amazon or Facebook, but from plucky entrepreneurs to the world’s most-advanced computing systems, Europe has a lot more to offer the world of cloud computing and web infrastructure than might meet the eye. Here are seven reasons why it matters.

Cloud computing tends to be a very North America-centric topic, if only because so many of the biggest providers of cloud resources and services are based in the United States. That’s fair enough — the business side of things is very important — but other continents, particularly Europe, have a lot more to bring to the table than just seemingly restrictive data privacy laws…

October 5, 2012 Off

VMware Hosting Provider StratoGen Offers Free Migration Service

By David

Grazed from StratoGen. Author: PR Announcement

StratoGen today announced the launch of a free migration service aimed at helping larger businesses migrate their on-site VMware estate into a hosted environment.

The move will significantly ease the transition to the cloud, whilst keeping costs low.

"I’m really delighted to be able to announce this service" said Karl Robinson, Vice President of Sales. "For larger organizations moving to the cloud can be a hugely expensive and complex process. Careful assessment and planning is needed to ensure business continuity, along with comprehensive testing to ensure security policies are in place and business applications function correctly. By offering this service free of charge we have taken away one of the last barriers for cloud adoption."

October 5, 2012 Off

Contractors: Don’t shirk your cloud responsibilities

By David

Grazed from Washington Technology. Author: Jim Sweeney.

A number of the game-changing trends highlighted in a recent Deltek report on the government market revolved around cloud computing; and how contractors need to think strategically to address agency challenges.

The market research firm’s Federal Information Technology Hardware Market, 2012-2017 report included the following as major challenges facing agencies:

Managing data, not infrastructure
Increasing efficiency
Enhancing enterprise services
Accelerating innovation
Consolidating acquisition avenues…

October 5, 2012 Off

Nine Ways To Manage Risk in Your Cloud Contracts

By David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Jacqueline Vanacek.

When purchasing cloud computing services, here are nine practical considerations to manage your business and legal risks to ensure successful adoption of this emerging compute model. These recommendations were presented at the San Francisco-based CloudCon Expo by Riaz Karamali, legal expert and partner at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP.

Mr. Karamali first suggested that if click-through terms do not fully meet your needs, writing the initial cloud contract to “factor in your business realities, compliance requirements and expectations” is the best way to ensure that your unique needs are met. While cloud services vendors usually offer one-size-fits-all terms, be sure to negotiate all ways to mitigate your risk.

The following checklist of nine practical tips can help you do that…

October 5, 2012 Off

Citrix Startup Accelerator backs Cloud Vertical to measure cloud spending

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Dublin-based Cloud Vertical, which wants to help companies get the most bang for their cloud computing buck, now has cash and backing from the Citrix Startup Accelerator to build its business, says Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne.

Cloud Vertical, a Dublin-based startup that helps companies maximize their public cloud spending, got a boost this week with new funding from the Citrix Startup Accelerator. While not disclosing the amount of the investment, Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne said it’s an important vote of confidence given that Citrix is the company behind both Xen, the virtualization foundation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and CloudStack, an open-source platform that powers private clouds…