Microsoft’s Nadella: We will democratize big data
Microsoft plans to bring big data to the little guy, said Satya Nadella, president of the Microsoft Server and Tools group and the executive directing the company’s gigantic Windows Azure cloud effort.
The company’s decision to make Hadoop a first-class citizen of Azure is a huge piece of the puzzle, but linking that technology to mere mortal end users with Excel is what will make big data broadly applicable, he said…
Where in the world is my data center?
In a world where data centers can be built on massive sites in rural North Carolina, in modular pods dropped down in Las Vegas, or in renewable energy-powered countries like Iceland, data center operators have a lot of options. Many are looking to differentiate themselves on efficiency and geography, says Kevin Timmons, the CTO of co-location data center operator CyrusOne, at GigaOM’s Structure event on Thursday.
Energy efficiency might not have been so important in the past, said Timmons, but that’s increasingly changing as the customer sees they can write a smaller check for using less power. Tate Cantrell, CTO of Verne Global, which built a data center in Iceland that runs completely on the country’s hydro and geothermal power, says renewable energy is also becoming an increasingly important factor in deciding where to build data centers…
Cloud Computing: Is OpenFlow an answer looking for a problem?
OpenFlow and software-defined networking may be hot topics in the infrastructure industry right now — but not everyone believes they are up to scratch.
At a panel discussing internet bypass and new data center fabrics at GigaOM’s Structure 2012 in San Francisco on Thursday, two senior industry figures said that the standard was still too immature to be useable.
Kenneth Duda, CTO and founder of cloud networking provider Arista Networks, launched a stinging criticism of OpenFlow — which he said was unable to do many of the jobs currently being ascribed to it…
Digital media experts tout AWS as best cloud starting point
Executives from Dropbox, Netflix and Evernote discuss the challenges for controlling huge infrastructure costs.
At GigaOm Structure 2011, the big theme was just getting businesses to consider adopting cloud computing. This year, it’s clear that the cloud has been accepted (for the most part) as the future of computing.
Now the debate is about which cloud vendors and strategies you should choose, whether you build something in-house, go with a major vendor like Amazon Web Services, develop a mixture of the two, and much more. Honestly, the choices can be overwhelming for both small businesses and large businesses stuck on old infrastructures with tight IT budgets…
Standardized Cloud APIs Aren’t Possible
Rackspace President Lew Moorman drew a line in the sand for cloud standards: On one side, he put those companies and commenters that think cloning Amazon’s APIs is the way forward. On the other side are those that think standards need to be open and developed independently of any particular vendor. I’m definitely in the latter camp, so I’m keeping good company, but the real question is: What, exactly, needs to be standardized?
The discussion seems to be around cloud APIs. Many want to standardize the semantics, headers, method calls, etc. That would make integrators’ jobs easier because they could create a single API, write to it and have it work anywhere. You don’t have to peek too far under the covers to see that isn’t possible or even desirable…
Vubiz launches premier Online Cloud Computing Course
The word "Cloud" no longer refers only to white puffy formations in the sky; technology has transformed the word "cloud" into today’s hottest buzzword. It starts with the word cloud as a metaphor for the Internet: derived from the cloud symbols that often represent the internet on diagrams. Cloud Computing gets a little more hazy, but generally describes a type of internet computing or utility computing and refers to the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a community of recipients.
Vubiz Elearning has launched one of the first online learning courses to explain this important new service and learn how businesses can benefit from cloud computing…
Samsung mulls enterprise cloud services for mobile devices
Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Agam Shah.
Samsung is looking into the idea of hosting its own cloud services to extend the appeal of its Android-based consumer smartphones and tablets to enterprises, the company said on Wednesday.
With more employees bringing personal devices to work, the company is thinking about building cloud-based services for enterprises to connect disparate devices based on different OSes, said Dave Lowe, vice president of enterprise sales at Samsung Mobile, during a launch event for the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone in New York.
"When I talked about … knitting together, stitching together devices, it’s absolutely a direction we want to go — creating cloud services," Lowe said…
Switching to Cloud Saves up to 90% of Energy Costs says Google
Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence de Borja.
A lot of people are focusing on the security issues of cloud computing that’s why they fail to see the probable energy savings it offers. Companies go to the clouds because they want to increase profits by lowering their expenses. However, they fail to see that cloud computing has environmental benefits also. In fact, cloud computing services do help in reducing carbon emissions and energy uses. Google had released a report that when a company switches to Google Apps and other online productivity tools, it stands to reduce its energy usage by as much as 85%.
Now, Google has proof that cloud computing does provide energy and money savings to government agencies and companies. It has recently published a whitepaper which documents the savings the US General Services Administration achieved when it switched to Google Apps. The US GSA switched to Gmail in 2011. At that time, the government agency expects to save as much as $3 million on their email operating expenses. When the organization switched to Google Apps, it further expects savings on its energy costs. With more than 17,000 GSA users around the country, Google has enough data to monitor GSA’s energy usage prior to using and after using Google Apps…
Oracle Boasts Most Comprehensive Cloud
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has done a 180-dgree turn on cloud computing, as he unveils the company’s new cloud offerings, boasting that they will be the "the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth." Ellison has previously been heard mocking the cloud computing movement, calling it simply a marketing strategy to repackage long-standing technologies. No such mockery surfaced on his Wednesday, June 6 webcast.
Ellison’s claims that the company’s public cloud offerings will be the most comprehensive yet seen in the cloud arena are based on the inclusion of a host of features encompassed in the company’s cloud. These features include the company’s suit of Fusion Applications, which will be available both as platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), and over 100 different applications in the cloud, including CRM, HCM, and ERP applications and top-level security protocols…
Bitcasa cloud service launches public beta
Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Cameron Scott.
Bitcasa, a consumer cloud services startup, launched a public beta of its unlimited cloud storage service on Wednesday.
The service claims to deliver "unlimited storage" by compressing data and de-duplicating files from multiple users, rather than simply storing all of each user’s files on its servers. If multiple users have the same file saved, Bitcasa saves pointers to the files rather than copies.
De-duplicating data across users has raised eyebrows among industry watchers. But the company says that file encryption occurs on the client side, keeping the user’s files safeguarded from intrusion by the company or other users, concerns that have potentially slowed the adoption of consumer cloud storage services…