Cloud Computing’s Next Big Thing Could Help the Environment
Grazed from WallStreet CheatSheet. Author: Jess Bolluyt.
What if there were a better way to save energy than all of the obvious ideas — solar power, wind energy, electric cars — one with even bigger effects on the environment? What if that solution were a better way to run the technology that the way we use the internet relies on? Wired reports that Zack Rosen, CEO and co-founder of professional website platform Pantheon, says that that there is. Rosen says that changing the way we use cloud computing, by switching from virtual machines to Linux containers, could have an even bigger impact on the environment than switching to electric cars.
What is a virtual machine?
In simple terms, Wired explains that virtual machines are “those things that let anyone run software on the massive cloud computing services offered up by the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.” A virtual machine is a software-based environment that emulates a computer…
Google made it clear today that it’s still going after enterprise users. After focusing much of its approximately two-and-a-half-hour-long Google I/O keynote on its Android platform and related devices, the company turned its attention to the enterprise with announcements about Google Docs and its cloud service. The changes represent something of a long play to pull in more business from large companies.
GoGrid founder and CEO John Keagy is hoping to bring together companies interesting in open source cloud that feel threatened by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create an open cloud orchestration engine. His project, which was recently unveiled, has been dubbed OpenOrchestration.org—more or less following suit with most open source cloud projects that have been launched over the last few years.
Big Blue’s future is unclear as it struggles to keep up with innovators and please investors. Its share price has dropped 11% this year, versus a 23% gain for the S&P 500 Information Technology Index. The century-old tech company has reported eight consecutive quarterly revenue declines; its annual revenue has hovered at about $100 billion since 2007.
Competition surrounding OpenStack in western Europe is heating up. Mirantis has announced the opening of a new facility in France, a move that comes shortly after Red Hat’s acquisition last week of eNovance, another OpenStack specialist with roots in the same country. Mirantis already has a strong presence in California and in eastern Europe (specifically, Russia, Ukraine and Poland), as well as an office in the Netherlands.
ownCloud, the open source file sharing and syncing platform, is aiming to provide a "Dropbox-like" experience, in its own words—as well as to blur the line demarcating private from public clouds by letting users share file between ownCloud instances. That’s all part of ownCloud 7 Community Edition, the latest version of the platform, which has been released in beta form.
Emeryville, California-based SellPoints used the cloud to create a completely new line of business based on the market insights it was generating from customers’ data. Driven by performance marketing and analytics vice president Benny Blum, the company adopted a cloud computing solution to crunch their own big data product in 2012 using Hadoop as a service from provider Altiscale.