Author: David

January 30, 2012 Off

Be wary of cloud lock-in, warns Ubuntu creator

By David
Grazed from TechCentral.ie.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud infrastructure was always meant to be based on open standards, and organisations that choose to buy capacity from public clouds that only support one standard are creating problems for themselves in the future, according to Ubuntu creator Canonical.

"All the world’s biggest clouds are built on open source technology," said Canonical’s vice president Chris Kenyon in a keynote session at Cloud Expo Europe. "They’re not all built on open standards, but open source underpins all of the largest plans."

Kenyon explained this is because open clouds are scalable, cheap and secure. He compared the evolution of cloud computing the evolution of the Internet, stating that although the Web existed before open standards, it was the arrival of HTML that prompted the explosion of innovation that made the web what it is today…

January 30, 2012 Off

Before jumping into cloud, learn from the SOA experience

By David
Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

You want expensive and duplicated service entanglements?  You want huge silos? That’s what cloud computing may bring enterprises that can’t manage and govern the process. All these issues have already been worked out in SOA settings, and companies that have worked with SOA approaches within their business technology are much better prepared to move into cloud computing than those not as familiar with SOA.

That’s the view of Thomas Erl, who is a best-selling and perhaps the most prolific IT author on the planet, and a passionate proponent of the “service technology” revolution reshaping enterprise systems. I recently caught up with Thomas, who is also CEO of Arcitura Education Inc., a service technology education and certification provider, incorporating SOASchool.com and CloudSchool.com, who discussed how SOA has prepared enterprises for today’s cloud computing endeavors…

January 30, 2012 Off

How to document cloud design decisions

By David
Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: David Taber.

When developing and integrating cloud systems, the public interfaces and external "contracts" among services mean that design and architecture can evolve rapidly and in parallel. But when they do and the teams are not in the same room, this speed is an invitation to chaos. As two teams work on opposite sides of an interface (the service provider and the service consumer), it’s easy for the teams’ definition of variables and methods to fall out of sync. Of course the service provider team could update its document and notify the other team about a new semantic of a field value or behavior of a service. But the reality is too often that they don’t, and the classic problem of distributed version control rears its ugly head.

Let’s start with some assumptions about cloud design and architecture:

1. The teams value speed and smarts over rigor and process.

2. The teams use an Agile process that stresses iterative development, with continuous integration and testing cycles…

January 30, 2012 Off

Tilera launches two new speedy cloud processors and names new CEO

By David
Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Dean Takahashi.

Tilera is announcing today it has launched new cloud computing processors with either 16 or 36 computing brains, or cores.

The company is also announcing that its founding chief executive, Devesh Garg, has rejoined the company as CEO. Garg served as CEO from 2004 to 2007. He moved back to India for personal reasons and became managing director Bessemer Venture Partners India fund. Omid Tahernia took Garg’s place in 2007 and is now stepping down and leaving the company.

Tilera is launching its Tile-Gx36 and Tile Gx-16 chips for cloud computing, networking, and multimedia applications. In contrast to Intel server chips, these chips have many more cores on a single chip (compared to two to four for most Intel chips), Tilera puts anywhere from 16 to 100 cores on a chip, all of them connected through high-speed networking. The result is a blazing-fast chip that is also power efficient…

January 30, 2012 Off

Here come the ‘micro’ cloud users

By David
Grazed from Hydrapinion.  Author: Ian Grayson.

I recently sat through a presentation by the owner of a small software firm who was busy pitching a new cloud-based computing offering to sporting clubs.

The sales patter highlighted some key benefits: smoother administration, reduced book work, easier tracking of membership details and faster collection of fees. The presentation was warmly received by a number of club leaders who were obviously tired of dealing with exactly these kinds of issues.

While many were not sure exactly what cloud computing might be, the benefits it seemed to offer had them queuing for more information at the end of the session…

January 30, 2012 Off

You can’t stop the Cloud revolution

By David
Grazed from ARN.  Author: Patrick Budmar.

Cloud computing is no longer on a roll but becoming a bullet train, according to Aegis Services Australia President, Chris Luxford.  It’s a lofty claim but one that is backed up by data from analyst firm, IDC, which has found that more than 20 per cent of Australian CIOs are currently using a Cloud solution.

IDC has also forecasted that the use of Cloud services by Australian companies, from SMBs all the way to enterprises, is set to quadruple by 2015.

The revenue for Cloud services in Australia is expected to increase from $470 million in 2010 to just over $2 billion in 2015 for a compound annual growth rate of 34 per cent…

January 29, 2012 Off

Cloud vs Virtualisation – A Natural Synergy?

By David
The Business Line.  Author: Balaji Narasimhan.

Many companies, which are turning to cloud computing, will find the need to manage their cloud space becoming more important. Most of these companies rely on both public and private clouds. The impact in India could be higher than in developed countries, if one goes by a research study conducted by IDC in November 2011. According to the study, less than half of end-users across Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will complete their private cloud projects by 2014.

The respondents of the IDC survey felt this was because of lack of experience in building these systems and because of higher-than-expected upfront investment requirements. IDC says that consequently an increased number of enterprises will make a detour to public cloud services. This, in turn, will result in the management of the hybrid cloud being more pronounced in countries like India…

January 28, 2012 Off

Europe stumps up £8 million for cloud computing strategy

By David
Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author:  Jennifer Baker.

One year after announcing her intention to develop a European Cloud Computing Strategy, Europe’s Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes this week made a first cash commitment to the initiative.

Following the announcement of the European Commission’s plans for the Data Protection Directive, Kroes said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the time is right to look to the cloud to help Europe get to grips with its copyright and piracy problems. She also announced a European Cloud Partnership with €10 million initial funding.Over the past year the commission has held talks with cloud providers, users and consumers to identify the main issues that need to be addressed…

January 28, 2012 Off

5 ways cloud ‘supercharges’ enterprise initiatives

By David
Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud in and of itself may or may not add value to the business, but it certainly can help supercharge other key enterprise initiatives.

Cloud can be positioned as the platform for a range of initiatives intended to help increase the agility and ability of the organization’s business technology. That’s the gist of a new book, authored by Pankaj Arora, Raj Biyani and Salil Dave, all Microsoft executives.

In To the Cloud: Powering an Enterprise, the authors explain how enterprise cloud benefits other initiatives within the enterprise:

1) Invest in shared services: “The ability to share physical servers is one cloud benefit, but the cloud can do more. Because a cloud scale unit caan be more granular than an application, enterprises can create functional components that can be shared across applications.”…

January 28, 2012 Off

Amazon’s Expanding Ventures in Cloud Computing

By David
Grazed from Investing.com.  Author:  Brandy Betz.

Goldman Sachs assigned a “neutral” rating to Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) this week after previewing the fourth-quarter report due for release on January 31. Analyst concerns include European sales potential and the investments that Amazon will need to make into its services, notably including cloud storage. Amazon has released two new cloud storage products in as many weeks that expand the data backup and recovery options available to businesses.

Cloud storage – which has been prominent in the news lately as the industry assesses potential fallout from the shutdown of storage site Megaupload, whose operators have been accused of digital piracy — provides users with a third-party-facilitated online storage network that charges customers only for the space they use. This setup is designed to take potentially costly backup and storage responsibilities out of the hands of business owners, allowing them to focus more on data production than its upkeep…