How to Avoid the Perils of Virtualization and Cloud Stall
Technologies like virtualization and cloud computing promise enormous leaps in efficiency and flexibility, but they can lead organizations into a quagmire if they don’t plan properly for the transition, says Bill Hurley, CIO, CTO and executive vice president of Westcon Group. Without proper planning, organizations can stall in the midst of their transitions to virtualized environments or the cloud, finding themselves with a bundle of sunk costs and no path forward.
Westcon Group is a value-added distributor of unified communications, network infrastructure, data center and security solutions that has made its own transition to a 100 percent virtualized environment and now helps its reseller, system integrator and service provider customers guide their own customers through the transition to virtualized environments and the cloud…
7 Ways IBM Will Make $7 Billion In Cloud
IBM in the near future will unveil a comprehensive initiative that better ties together its multi-pronged efforts to offer cloud computing services, according to one of its top cloud strategists.
It’s not just concentrating on devoting new resources to developers or more hosted services in the cloud for large enterprises, something IBM has already done for years. Rather, IBM will present customers with a broad initiative meant to help them leave behind today’s complex and inefficient data center management model and move toward a more cloud-like operation–whether a private cloud on-premise or a private cloud at an IBM data center. 
Ultimately, IBM believes many Fortune 500 cloud services users will become hybrid, public/private cloud operations, said Jim Comfort, VP of cloud offering management for IBM’s Global Technology Services. We’re not there yet by any means. But as a giant step in that direction, "many businesses are becoming service providers for themselves," Comfort said. They’re concentrating on a private cloud first, with use of public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service to follow. Consider some key parts of IBM’s plans…
GoGrid Introduces Big Data Solution
"The GoGrid cloud is about automation and allowing customers to scale efficiently," said Jeffrey Samuels, chief marketing officer, GoGrid. On Tuesday GoGrid announced the GoGrid Big Data Solution, a new offering based on a hybrid infrastructure architecture that combines the best of cloud computing with single-tenant infrastructure components – all managed through the GoGrid management portal. This solution provides businesses with maximum flexibility, choice, performance, and control. GoGrid’s new Big Data Solution is built to support high-performance analytic jobs and can be used for applications that leverage NoSQL solutions like Hadoop to serve up content via app servers.
"With the introduction of the new Big Data Solution," Samuels noted, "GoGrid provides businesses with a reliable, high-performance hybrid cloud infrastructure specifically designed for Big Data workloads in the cloud."…
7 Salient Trends and Directions in Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving field and as more enterprises join the platform, new trends are emerging. In this post, I will cover the major trends in cloud computing for the immediate future (2012-14).
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Cloud storage goes mainstream in consumer segment.
While cloud based storage services such as the Dropbox have existed for a while, they have not captured the mainstream “mom & pop” users. The problems include small storage limits (2 GB in case of free Dropbox accounts), requirement of separate apps to install, weak integration with the file systems, small size and marketing budgets of the storage companies (the maarket leader, Dropbox is still a startup) etc…
The Complex Transition to the Cloud
In June of 2008 I participated in a conference on cloud computing. After a full day of talks and discussions, the sense of the meeting was that cloud computing has the promise to bring a real paradigm shift to the IT world, although, as the conference organizer succinctly put it in his closing remarks: “There is a clear consensus that there is no real consensus on what cloud computing is.” In other words, something big and profound seems to be going on, although we are not totally sure what it is yet.
Where are we now, almost four years later? Just about everyone agrees that cloud computing is one of the major trends in IT, with important implications not only to IT but to business and society in general. Many books and articles have been written on the subject. A number of companies have cloud-based offerings in the marketplace, with more to come. But, while many of us feel that cloud is even bigger and more profound than we thought back in 2008, lots of questions remain on its intrinsic nature and its value to the business…
Open data center alliance, feds work on standardizing cloud, open government
The Open Data Center Alliance a group of public companies focused on standardizing the IT requirements for cloud projects has released five new models for data usage. According to the Alliance, the usage models are based on user driven feedback about cloud computing as well as the original vision set out by the organization last year to define IT requirements for open and interoperable cloud solutions. The announcement comes at the same time as a federal big data initiative and cloud first strategy as well as NASA’s release of its Open Government Plan, which includes a flagship initiative to build a new web architecture and a renewed focus on open data sharing, open source development and a variety of technology acceleration efforts.
Taken together these plans signal big moves in both public and private sector to modernize and streamline technology infrastructure through cloud services. The shift to cloud is also making it easier for public and private organizations to manage and release big data thus increasing transparency and accelerating new information discovery…
Nimbis Demos WorkFlow-as-a-Service for Semiconductor Design
Nimbis Services Inc. conducted a live demonstration at GOMACTech ’12 of a semiconductor design-to-release-manufacturing cloud computing WorkFlow-as-a-Service (WFaaS) portal, the Trusted Silicon Stratus Demonstration Cloud (TSS-DC). Nimbis Services under contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) implemented the TSS-DC as the first virtualized computing cloud for chip design using the open source OpenStack cloud computing middleware and Cisco Systems’ Unified Computing System (UCS).
A primary design objective of the TSS-DC was to demonstrate how a private cloud computing architecture could be used to address the High Performance Computing (HPC) demands of semiconductor integrated circuit design for key Department of Defense (DoD) research and development labs. According to Robert Graybill, Nimbis’ CEO, “…an operational TSS Demonstration Cloud represents a critical milestone in the execution of the Nimbis’ AFRL contract.”…
How to negotiate a contract with a cloud or SaaS provider
Cloud and SaaS services are rapidly gaining traction with enterprises and SMBs — yet IT, which is usually responsible for negotiating contracts with these service providers, may fall short in critical areas of contract negotiation and legal skills. The stakes are high. In a worst case scenario, you can simply realize that you made a mistake, and that you must get out of a contract. In less dire cases, you can find yourself relying on a vendor that doesn’t execute to your business SLAs as your internal staff would. The best way to set expectations is by laying them out clearly in the contract that you sign with your vendor. This provides a platform for ongoing discussions about service levels…
Major Cloud Provider Selects Mellanox and Supermicro for New Large-Scale Cloud
Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (tase:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, and Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology innovation and green computing, today announced that a major Asian cloud provider selected Supermicro servers and Mellanox’s Virtual Protocol Interconnect® (VPI) solution to form one of the world’s largest cloud solutions. Mellanox’s 40GbE NICs and switches, and FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand adapter and switches connect the 5,000-node based cloud, delivering the highest cloud performance, flexibility and simplicity…
Eucalyptus and Amazon work together to expand cloud adoption
The folks at Eucalyptus reached out and offered me an opportunity to speak with Marten Mickos, CEO, and David Butler, Senior VP of Marketing. It was a wonderful opportunity to both learn about what the company was doing and to reconnect with Marten.
Who is Eucalyptus?
Eucalyptus started in 2007 as a project of the computer science department at the University of California Santa Barbara. The project was partially funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation…