Suffering from cloud contention? It’s not the cloud’s fault
Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.
If you’re in the cloud space, you’ve heard the term "noisy neighbor" before. If not, here’s a tip: It’s not about the house next door with the weird kids who play German death metal at full blast. It’s about your cloud provider’s support of tenancy. Cloud workloads that put large demands on the server, storage, database, or network — hurting the performance of other workloads that share those resources — have been a problem both inside corporate data centers and, in particular, on SaaS and IaaS cloud platforms. When you own the servers you at least have some control over the situation. If others control the servers — the case in the cloud — all you can do is to complain to them.
This "noisy neighbor" issue is a core reason why many enterprises have not moved their important applications to the cloud. The fear is that someone running an intensive application on another machine instance in the same infrastructure you’re sharing may affect your performance. In my experience, however, this fear isn’t borne out in practice…
Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/suffering-cloud-contention-its-not-the-clouds-fault-249528
Just before the beginning of VMworld 2014 VMware
People who use cloud computing on a regular basis are familiar with the suite of “as-a-service” options: Infrastructure-as-a-service, Software-as-a-service, Platform-as-a-service. IBM is ready to introduce another: Watson-as-a-service. IBM announced last week it has moved its cognitive computing system into the cloud to form the Watson Discovery Advisor, allowing researchers, academics and anyone else trying to leverage big data the ability to test programs and hypotheses at speeds never before seen.
Cloud storage and computing, bruited as the electronic world’s big advance that enabled storage of your videos, music, photos, and other heavy data in remote servers, has come under a cloud. Turns out the of secure remote servers, including iCloud pioneered by Apple Inc., may be a pie in the sky after all; a hacker has broken into the iCloud system and siphoned off private photos of actresses that are now being slobbered over on social media by lascivious celebrity stalkers.
As organizations get more comfortable using cloud services, there is a corresponding increase in the number of services that not only take an existing process and deliver it via the cloud, but that also take advantage of the fact that business processes are now exposed to derive some insights from the data contained within them.
Citrix and Google have extended their relationship with the unveiling of a new Receiver for Chrome, which the companies say offers improved user experience. A Chromebook is a laptop running Chrome OS as its operating system. The devices are designed to be used primarily while connected to the Internet, with most applications and data residing in the cloud.
Microsoft is continuing its fight against a US federal court order that demanded that the software giant hand over email data held in a data centre overseas to US federal authorities. The company has said that it would not release any information as it waits for the case to make its way through the appeals process, according to WindowsITPro.
Telco Zayo has launched a Connect to the Cloud program that links cloud providers – including Amazon web services (AWS) and Softlayer – with 500 data centers worldwide. The aim is to simplify shopping for cloud connections and help customers to operate a hybrid cloud, according to Zayo, which uses its own network rather than the public internet in order to offer high service levels.