Author: David

April 26, 2011 Off

Embracing IT Service Management in the Cloud

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Michael Vizard.

There’s a lot of pressure these days on IT organizations to come up with more efficient ways of managing IT environments. A lot of that effort seems to focus on revamping the internal help desk by embracing new processes such as those defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) specification.

 

April 26, 2011 Off

An Open Network for an Open Cloud

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

The cloud takes the pressure off of server and storage resources in the hunt for more performance and capacity, but it places it squarely on the shoulders of network infrastructure.

But the more that enterprises rely on their networks (and other networks) to accelerate productivity, the more they come to realize the deficiencies of the proprietary network architectures that have evolved over the years. After all, limitless scalability and dynamic flexibility are only possible if data can smoothly negotiate the myriad pathways linking resources together.

April 26, 2011 Off

Final Thoughts on the Five-Day AWS Outage

By David
Grazed from eWeek.  Author:  Chris Preimesberger

Five full days after its largest outage hit on the morning of April 21, Amazon Web Services said it finally has restored virtually all services to its customers.

However, there still are a lot of smoldering IT managers who haven’t yet cooled off completely from the outage that started at 1:41 a.m. PDT April 21 at the AWS data center in Northern Virginia.

April 26, 2011 Off

Infosec: Cloud computing ‘explodes’ the security perimeter

By David
Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Anh Nguyen.

Cloud computing makes the argument for protecting data, rather than the perimeter, stronger, according to encryption solutions provider SafeNet.

This is just one of the issues that the cloud computing trend poses for IT professionals, who, according to a recent report from Accenture and the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Outsourcing Unit, are still on the whole unconvinced by the cloud, due to security and privacy concerns.

April 25, 2011 Off

Big data: You’ll have it, but can you handle it?

By David
Grazed from Government Computer News.  Author: Michael Daconta.

In 1999, I was called in to troubleshoot a customer’s client/server application that had recently failed a government acceptance test by taking more than 20 minutes to complete queries during stress testing. After months of intense software redesign that included overcoming pushback from a recalcitrant software development team, we were able to increase query performance by 2,000 percent, and the system subsequently passed its acceptance test. 

April 25, 2011 Off

Really Remote Data

By David
Grazed from MIT Technology Review.  Author: Christopher Mims.

Researchers at Cambridge University want to put data centers in places so remote they aren’t on any power grid. Their models indicate that moving data-hungry computation to places such as scorching deserts, windswept peaks, and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—all rich in sunlight and wind energy—could allow this otherwise unharvestable energy to do useful work.

April 25, 2011 Off

Amax Rolls Out New Cloud Appliance for SMBs

By David
Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

CloudMax is an on-premises, x86-based private cloud appliance that integrates hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and dynamic management to create a private cloud environment.

April 23, 2011 Off

Building a smart engine for multi-cloud, highly available IaaS

By David

Grazed from CloudNod.  Author:  Scott Sanchez.

I’ve been having a conversation on twitter with @reillyusa this morning about how a “cloud of clouds” could help prevent a single point of failure like we saw take down so many sites yesterday due to issues at AWS.  One availability zone or region goes down at AWS?  No problem, as service levels started to degrade your apps/data/state/etc was moved to another zone or to Rackspace or someone else.  The engine would reduce the cost of having HA because it would make smart decisions about where, how and why to move workloads, and could even have a bunch of hot/warm instances running that are transparently shared across users to reduce the cost of having your own ‘dedicated’ instances at other clouds waiting for you to fail…

April 22, 2011 Off

Amazon EC2 Day 2: Assessing The Damage

By David
Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Tomio Geron.

The crash of Amazon’s cloud services for web sites, EC2, is now in its second day.

The service went down yesterday at 1:42am PT, shutting down the websites of a number of start-up companies, including Foursquare, Quora and Reddit.