What Google Compute Engine means for cloud computing
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.
Google’s new infrastructure-as-a-service offering Compute Engine is a big, big deal in the world of cloud computing. My colleague Om Malik covered the details in a post earlier today, and we’ve both offered our pre-emptive views in posts breaking the news that Compute Engine was coming and then confirming it would be announced at IO.
Now that it’s a reality, here are five things I think Google Compute Engine means for the cloud industry…
Puppet Labs Announces Integration with Google Compute Engine
Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, announced today that its flagship commercial product, Puppet Enterprise, is fully integrated with Google Compute Engine. Puppet Enterprise customers can freely and immediately download the Google Compute Engine module from Puppet Forge. Using Puppet Enterprise, system administrators can rapidly deploy and scale Google Compute Engine cloud applications in response to the quickly changing needs of the business at a fraction of the cost of on-premise solutions.
Puppet Enterprise’s unique approach to IT automation uses a declarative, model-based technology, which enables system administrators to define reusable configurations of services and applications. Puppet Enterprise then automatically creates and enforces these definitions across any deployment environment, from on-premise to thecloud, and across any operating system, from Windows to Unix to Linux. By automating the management of their infrastructure with Puppet Enterprise, atypical IT organization will see a 10x boost in productivity, a 75% reduction in applications’ time-to-production, and a significant reduction in service outages.
OpenNebula Unveils Its New Virtual Appliance Marketplace
The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the public availability of the OpenNebula Marketplace, an online catalog where individuals and organizations can quickly distribute and deploy virtual appliances ready-to-run on OpenNebula clouds. The new Marketplace is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula 3.6 so any user of an OpenNebula cloud can find and deploy virtual appliances in a single click. The OpenNebula marketplace is also of interest to software developer looking to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide.
The OpenNebula Marketplace is available at no charge to all OpenNebula users and appliance developers. The Marketplace is not an online store but a service to bring together cloud users interested in pre-built software solutions and software developers and vendors interested in distributing and promoting their applications and services. The Marketplace contains community appliances built with open-source components and commercial appliances that provide evaluation versions of commercial software. It also includes appliances only available for C12G Labs subscribers.
ScaleXtreme to Support Google Compute Engine
ScaleXtreme, a leading provider of cloud and server management products, announced coming support for Google Compute Engine. As part of this support, ScaleXtreme customers will be able to monitor, manage, patch and automate deployment of Google Infrastructure-as-a-Service servers.
“We’re excited to see Google give public cloud computing customers additional choices in who to partner with for infrastructure,” said ScaleXtreme CEO Nand Mulchandani. “We built ScaleXtreme to handle multiple clouds simultaneously and along with internal enterprise infrastructure. Google Compute Engine, along with services like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, HP Cloud Services, Microsoft Windows Azure and VMware vCloud powered services is making multi-cloud infrastructure a reality for customers, and ScaleXtreme has given customers native support for all these platforms.”
Getting Cyber Serious: Mastering the Challenges of Federal Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is an emerging idea that seeks to replace the large databases and servers maintained by many companies and government agencies with Internet-based solutions. The private sector has increasingly adopted this idea, and the federal government has shown interest because of potential cost savings and security benefits.
With potential savings of more than $10 billion in information technology (IT) budgets, it was inevitable that the Obama Administration would pursue cloud computing for the federal government. However, Congress and the Administration should move forward carefully and deliberately to avoid potential pitfalls. If done correctly, federal migration to cloud computing offers streamlined efficiency that would make better use of U.S. tax dollars…
How NASA Helped Open-Source Cloud Take Off
The Shuttle fleet may be retired, but NASA’s innovation efforts continue unabated, with the agency’s latest contribution driving the world of cloud computing. In fact, the story of how-and even more so, why-NASA has taken a leadership role in the cloud is a fascinating example of our tax dollars well spent, and a prime example of the government’s new mantra to do more with less.
NASA’s Open Government Culture
NASA’s role as government-funded innovator dates to its founding. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 called for NASA’s active participation in the scientific community, wide dissemination of information regarding its activities and the encouragement of commercial use of space…
Atlantis sucks the storage cost out of enterprise apps
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.
Atlantis Computing thinks that as cheap as storage has become, it’s still too expensive. Its goal is to suck as much of that cost out of your IT infrastructure as possible. First it offered software that CEO Bernard Harguindeguy says cuts the storage requirement for desktop virtualiation implementations by up to 90 percent. The ILIO Diskless VDI software does so by compressing the data and using local desktop storage to shoulder the burden.
Now, this GigaOM Launchpad finalist is applying its software smarts to storage-intensive server applications such as Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Server as well with ILIO Flexcloud.
“Hadoop requires a lot of storage very close to the compute resource, we think we solve that problem,” he said. Running it on server RAM lets you virtualize Hadoop and run multiple copies on the same server sharing RAM as the primary storage, Atlantis CEO Bernard Harquindeguy told me in a recent interview…
EPA Aims For 80% Cloud Use By 2015
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Patience Wait.
The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded a three-year, $15 million contract to IT services firm CGI Federal as part of a broad plan to shift up to 80% of its computing environment to the cloud by 2015.
The award was made under a General Services Administration blanket purchase agreement for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). CGI is one of a dozen vendors that have been approved under the BPA to provide certified, secure cloud services–including storage, virtual machines, and Web hosting–to federal agencies…
World’s First Tamper-Evident Cloud — Estonian Telco Levira Teams Up With Joyent and Guardtime
Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.
Joyent and Guardtime’s cloud computing technology enables Levira, the Estonian government’s majority owned service provider, to offer secure cloud-computing services to Governments and enterprises in Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe. Levira also aims to start providing secure cloud services for multinational corporations that need to comply with the data residency requirements also outside of their home soil.
"Joyent’s double hulled virtualization and Guardtime’s keyless signature technology makes a formidable combination for enterprises and governments who wish to move to a cloud computing environment but hesitate due to security and trust-related concerns," said Mart Einpalu, CEO of Levira. "Our mission is to become a leading cloud computing service provider in Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe and our unique ability to give our clients tools to prove with mathematical certainty that their data has been safe and in compliance with the regulations is a paramount requirement to achieve that."…
Misdirected concerns around data security are threatening Canada’s economic competitiveness
Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.
Concerns over data security and a limited knowledge of cloud computing are putting Canada’s economic competitiveness at risk, as business and IT leaders fail to adopt new cloud technologies, according to an TELUS and IDC Canada study released today.
The study, commissioned by TELUS, reveals that the majority of Canadian organizations currently using cloud computing say it has transformed the way they work by allowing them to re-focus resources on meeting strategic business objectives. Yet 71 per cent of Canadian businesses are risking their competitive edge because they aren’t open to alternative IT delivery models that can bring new levels of productivity and enhanced customer service to their organizations…