Author: David

September 24, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing Can Use Energy Efficiently

By David
Grazed from The New York Times.  Author: Urs Hölzle.

Google’s servers refresh 20 billion pages a day, process over 100 billion search queries a month, provide email for 425 million Gmail users and process 72 hours of video uploaded per minute to YouTube. And yet we’re able to do all that work with relatively little energy, compared to other industries.

Data centers are responsible for between 1.1 and 1.5 percent of global energy use (compare that to transportation at 25 percent), and Google’s data centers are less than a percent of that. It’s a testament to the almost unimaginable improvements in computing power per watt that Moore’s Law has brought us over the past decades. Searching virtually all the world’s online information for a billion users with just 0.01 percent of global energy use illustrates how much less energy it takes to move electrons (information) than atoms (physical things)…

September 23, 2012 Off

Can HP jumpstart its cloud computing effort?

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

The troubled IT giant is about to tweak its cloud services effort according to a Bloomberg News report. The question is whether yet another new strategy can give the company the traction it needs so badly.  Cloud computing has been designated a top priority for Hewlett-Packard which sees its legacy PC, server, and printing businesses under fire. Now it  looks like the company is retooling that key cloud effort, according to a report from Bloomberg News.

A new division, headed by Saar Gillai, is charged with weaving the disparate pieces of HP’s cloud strategy and together, according to the report which cites an internal HP memo as its source. One of HP’s problems has long been that it fields a diverse and sometimes incomprehensible array of products and services. That may have been fine when HP was top dog and could sell anything. Now, that lack of clarity is a serious problem for a company that’s been trying to downsize its way to profitability. (HP will cut 29,000 jobs before October 2014.)…

September 23, 2012 Off

Oracle to announce new IaaS cloud computing service offering at OpenWorld

By David
Grazed from TechWord.  Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Oracle will announce a new IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offering at the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, CEO Larry Ellison said on Thursday.

The service will provide customers with access to secure, virtualised compute power hosted in an Oracle data centre, Ellison said. Oracle will also sell software for customers to build "identical services" in their own data centers, allowing them to move workloads back and forth between the public and private clouds, he said…

September 23, 2012 Off

What role does open source play in cloud computing innovation?

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Ignacio M. Llorente.

Why use open source for building and designing cloud? Because open-source software stacks offer a huge amount of customizeability so the cloud you build actually does what you need it to do — and without huge licensing fees.  How can open-source cloud management tools like Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula (the European open-source cloud effort of which I am director) impact the adoption of cloud technology?  I see it happening in a few broad ways.

Lowering the barrier to entry

First, most organizations adopt cloud to optimize their IT investment, to improve existing services or to support new business and service models. In this scenario, open-source lowers the barriers for new organizations to build their private cloud. Many organizations have adopted OpenNebula to build their private cloud. Some are very small clouds with tens of hosts, some are very large infrastructures composed of several data centers. In many of these cases, paying license fees for commercial software was simply not an option. In such cases, the choice comes down to open source cloud or no cloud at all…

September 23, 2012 Off

Salesforce.com: Analytics Can No Longer Be a Dream

By David
Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Mark A. Smith.

Salesforce has helped revolutionize cloud computing for business, and its social media and collaborative technologies help advance business processes in sales, customer service and improve the interactions between employees, partners and customers. Salesforce has made great advancements in cloud, social and mobile technology, as I have assessed and my colleague did too.

I thought Dreamforce would be a good time to investigate the state of its analytics that have been evolving since last year. I have spent the last couple of decades in the analytics industry across business and IT and thought it might be useful to provide objective analysis on Salesforce Analytics so I went to educational sessions on the products and demonstrations of their software and use by customers. I also have noted in my analysis from the 2011 Dreamforce event that they needed to improve and was not one of its strengths. The role of business analytics is critical for Salesforce’s entire software portfolio, and especially for software within sales organizations, of which almost two-thirds (64%) plan to improve their sales analytics…

September 21, 2012 Off

Cloud computing compliance an issue at banks

By David

Grazed from FierceFinanceIT. AuthorL Jim Kim.

Back in July, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) released a document to guide financial institutions in the tricky area of cloud-based solutions deployment. The guidance was topical obviously, as more banks are embracing cloud solutions at all levels. The economics increasingly make sense. The document laid out some guidance in the following areas: Due diligence, vendor management, information security, audits, legal and regulatory compliance, and business continuity planning.

Since the guidance was released, the idea that banks need even more guidance has become vogue, as some suggested that the released guidance was lacking a bit. Bank Technology News weighs in on this issue with a look at critical areas of cloud compliance. One expert was quoted said that the criticisms of the FFIEC reflect the view that the FFIEC guidance is "high level" and treats cloud computing like another kind of outsourcing…

September 21, 2012 Off

HP’s Whitman Said Planning Cloud-to-Tablet Push to Revive Growth

By David

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman is betting that refining the company’s existing strategy, rather than making radical shifts, will help reverse the fortunes of the struggling computer maker.

Whitman, a year into the CEO job, plans to sharpen the company’s focus on corporate clients with a new product lineup that includes software and tablets for businesses and a machine that combines storage, computing and networking, according to people familiar with the matter. She’ll explain her approach to analysts Oct. 3 in San Francisco, said the people, who requested anonymity because the plans are private…

September 21, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Oracle’s hardware hangover continues

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Oracle’s still fighting to recover, recoup and profit from its $7.4 billion buyout of Sun Microsystems three years ago. In its first quarter, Oracle’s overall hardware business was off 24 percent year over year despite “triple-digit growth” in engineered systems like Exadata.

Oracle’s plan to wring software-like profit from its hardware business still hasn’t panned out nearly three years after it bought Sun Microsystems’ server-and-storage business for $7.4 billion. And that’s got to bug CEO Larry Ellison who is a bear on execution and profitability…

September 21, 2012 Off

Cloud Backup Services Compared

By David

Grazed from ExtremeTech. Author:  Joel Hruska.

In our first story, we discussed backup philosophy, common misconceptions of what constituted a backup, and the criteria we’d use for developing a comprehensive backup policy. This article focuses on online/cloud backup services and compares three of the top solutions on the market today — Backblaze, Mozy and Carbonite.

The explosion in “cloud computing” as a moniker has made it difficult to distinguish the difference between various types of services. We suggest three basic categories: File lockers, online backup services, and online archives. Archiving services are beyond the scope of this series and are currently marketed towards businesses, not consumers. Amazon Glacier attracted a great deal of attention when it launched a few weeks back, but it’s not intended for just anyone to use. There’s no management console of any kind, and data transfers are handled via Java or .NET scripts. This article uses the phrase “online backup service” and “cloud backup service” interchangeably…

September 21, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: SSDs boost Instagram’s speed on Amazon EC2

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

Instagram can drive data to its computing systems on Amazon.com’s EC2 service 20 times as fast with solid-state drives, a co-founder of the photo-sharing service said on Thursday at the GigaOm Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Rather than access data from networked hard disk drives, Instagram’s server instances on EC2 can use directly connected solid-state disks, said Mike Krieger, a co-founder of the company that Facebook agreed to acquire in April for about $1 billion. Instagram got trial access to solid-state drives on the EC2 cloud-computing platform before that option became generally available, one of the perks of being a large customer, Krieger said…