Friday 03 September 2010
Google Inc. will sell the online services of other business software makers in an effort to fill its own product gaps and persuade more companies to rely on applications piped over the Internet.
The online store that was announced late Tuesday marks another step in Google’s crusade to convert the world to “cloud computing,” the idea of running applications in Web browsers instead of installing them on individual hard drives. The information entered in the programs also is stored in data centers run by third parties such as Google.
More than 50 software makers have agreed to sell their Internet programs through Google, which will keep 20 percent of the sales. The prices are expected to range from $50 annually to several hundred dollars annually per user.
Intuit Inc., a maker of business accounting software, and Concur Technologies Inc., a maker of expense reimbursement software, are among the best-known vendors peddling their wares in Google’s store.
All the applications sold in Google’s store can be melded with Google’s own cloud-computing services, said Vic Gundotra, the company’s vice president of engineering.
Google views cloud computing as a way to deepen people’s dependence on its services and generate more revenue beyond the Internet search advertising that provides virtually all its income.
Cloud computing also provides Google with a weapon that could weaken one of its biggest rivals, Microsoft Corp.
Although it’s introducing more online alternatives, Microsoft still makes most of its money from individual computer licenses of its Windows operating system and software programs.
The applications store could also could provide fodder for the low-cost computers that will run on a Google operating system named after its Chrome Web browser. The first computers using Chrome OS won’t have a hard drive, meaning they will need Internet access and cloud-computing services to perform the tasks routinely done on Windows-powered machines.
Google began offering a free online suite of
VMware vSphere 4 Training
Recognizing that the vast majority of corporations have adopted VMware virtualization technologies to optimize performance while reducing costs, Batky-Howell has introduced a vendor-neutral, four-day VMware vSphere 4 course as a private training delivery, available immediately. The all-inclusive training event includes training at the client’s site, all the necessary course and lab materials, and individual access to an ESX server - providing an intense, hands-on learning experience.
VMware vSphere 4 encompasses a new suite of products that provides enhanced scalability, flexibility and reliability for server virtualization and opens the door to cloud computing. With VMware vSphere 4, data centers can deliver computing resources in an agile and cost-effective way.
The vendor-neutral aspect of this course ensures that students are exposed to both VMware and third-party tools, eliminating bias towards VMware-specific or endorsed products. The classroom lab will share a cluster of ESX Servers, a variety of different storage solutions (SAN, NAS, ISCI, local) as needed, a variety of third-party tools, and access to many pre-configured Virtual Machines, including Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. Each student will perform lab exercises using their own ESX Server and a Windows Server Workstation.
“This course is an extremely affordable and intense learning option compared to authorized VMware vSphere training. Over 70% of class time is devoted to live-lab exercises, ensuring students leave the course with a comprehensive, real-world knowledge of ESX Server, vCenter, and Virtual Machine Architecture, as well as advanced management techniques,” said, Bruce Batky, CEO.
A four-day Advanced vSphere training course and a three-day course specific to VMware View Manager 3 will be announced as available for private delivery shortly. In addition, Batky-Howell will continue to offer their VMware Infrastructure 3 Install, Configure, and Advanced Management course as a private training event for those organizations who have yet to migrate to the VMware vSphere platform.
About Batky-Howell, LLC
Since 1989, Batky-Howell has specialized in providing education and skill development of IT professionals, including software developers, programmers, system administrators and database administrators. Over 43,000 students have been trained by Batky-Howell in 3,200 courses - ranging from introductory HTML to advanced topics in UNIX, Java, Oracle, VMware, .NET, and more. Flexible training delivery options allow Batky-Howell to offer customers a cost-effective solution in a private or virtual classroom setting.
The packages enable the delivery of Cloud Based Computing by building virtual machines to run multiple operating systems on a single or multiple servers. This saves its users on hardware costs, which is important in these times when businesses are watching their bottom lines like never before. It also allows for easier backup, restore and server maintenance. We are continually seeking new offerings that allow our clients to leverage the latest in technology, while focusing on our value oriented proposition,” says Jon Ham, senior vice president of technology for ServerPronto. “Our ESXi Cloud offering brings our customers the latest innovations that will allow them to deliver the optimal value to their clients. Companies which use the ESXi dedicated servers can deliver Cloud Based virtual computing to their customers. And the combination of powerful features and benefits offered by ESXi Dedicated Servers are unique in the industry.
The ESXi Package offers an advantage over the standard server platform in its ability to host multiple virtual servers of differing operating systems on a single hardware platform. A server typically can run only one operating system. ESXi has eliminated this limitation and shrunk the kernel and surrounding applications to use as few resources as possible. The ESXi Plus package has all of the benefits of the ESXi package, but offers twice as much RAM and twice the storage space. This allows purchasers to virtualize even the most resource-intensive applications. ServerPronto is part of the ‘Pronto family’ of companies with MailPronto and ColoPronto which have been leading a low-cost revolution in the hosting industry since 2003. Following in those footsteps, ServerPronto is breaking the price barrier for dedicated hosting in secured and reinforced Data Centers with redundant power, lightning fast fiber connections, and 24X7X365 support from a staff with more than 10 years experience building and maintaining servers and computer networks.
Vivek Kundra, America’s chief information officer, recently spoke with GigaOm.com about the government’s plans to use existing commercial cloud computing software and to possibly develop their own. The government currently uses mainly “energy-guzzling” data centers, using 1.2 billion kilowatts a year to run 600,000 servers, reported GigaOm.com. “As I’ve looked at the processes and investments that we’re making across the government, a lot of the investments that we’re making make no sense,” Kundra told the website. “Does the U.S. government need to own all these data centers or is there a new computing model that we could leverage?” he asked.
Kundra has indeed been researching the answer to that question, telling the website that the government may be interested in leveraging commercial cloud computing platforms for data that is not classified or sensitive. In addition, they are investigating a “digital storefront for cloud computing solutions,” and have begun planning some pilot projects. Commercial businesses can also use cloud computing to reduce their in-house IT costs and even energy budgets, experts say - a recent report by NetSuite found that cloud computing saves the equivalent of 1 million barrels of oil each year.
Like most technologies at the “hype” life-cycle stage, cloud computing can apparently do no wrong — it’s the cure for expensive infrastructure ownership, lack of business agility and spending overruns. The ability to purchase computing cycles and storage space on demand is perennially attractive — which is why such services have been available since the 1960s, and continue to pique interest today. Although just 20% of the IT pros I’m working with say they’re considering cloud computing, many are interested in exploring its benefits (63% of the folks who have a single data center say they’re interested in exploring cloud computing). But for network managers, cloud computing comes with a hidden risk: network dependency. The two big issues are the cost and quality of the network infrastructure required to gain access to the computing cloud.
Let’s start with cost. Moving data and computing cycles away from the user means increasing the bandwidth between users and data. In itself, that’s no biggie – most companies have been steadily increasing bandwidth as they consolidate data centers and as user populations become increasingly dispersed. However, most cloud computing initiatives are in addition to — not instead of — existing data centers. That means network managers may not have explicitly budgeted the increase in bandwidth to the cloud (even though they’ve planned for capacity upgrades to the data center). In other words, deployment of cloud computing may increase network costs above what’s already been planned for.
The National Security Agency is taking a cloud computing approach in developing a new collaborative intelligence gathering system that will link disparate intelligence databases. The system, currently in testing, will be geographically distributed in data centers around the country, and it will hold ”essentially every kind of data there is,” said Randy Garrett, director of technology for NSA’s integrated intelligence program, at a cloud computing symposium last week at the National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College. The system will house streaming data, unstructured text, large files, and other forms of intelligence data. Analysts will be able to add metadata and tags that, among other things, designate how securely information is to be handled and how widely it gets disseminated. For end users, the system will come with search, discovery, collaboration, correlation, and analysis tools.
The NSA effort is part of Intelligence Community Directive 501, an effort to overhaul intelligence sharing proposed under the Bush administration. Current director of national intelligence Dennis Blair has promised that intelligence sharing will remain a priority. “The legacy systems must be modernized and consolidated to allow for data to actually be shared across an enterprise, and the organizations that collect intelligence must be trained and incentivized to distribute it widely,” he said in response to questions from the Senate prior to his confirmation. The new system will run on commodity hardware and ”largely” on commercial software, Garrett said. The NSA will manage the arrayed servers as a pool of resources rather than as individual machines.
With the technology still in its adolescence, it is hard to say precisely when cloud technology will provide significant upside to investors. It is useful, however, to first make a distinction between the different types of clouds that are available basically “private” vs. “public.” A private cloud could be used, for example, by a company looking to access IT resources across its own data centers, most likely through virtualized servers. A public cloud, on the other hand, would mean using the Internet to access applications and data hosted on someone else’s gear. number of technology companies are touting the hardware and software to build both types of cloud. Notable among these are Cisco(CSCO Quote), with its UCS device, H-P, with its Matrix offering, and IBM, which recently launched a slew of new cloud products.
Based on the energy savings earned by customers of NetSuite, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company based in San Mateo, Calif., companies can save an average of $10,000 a year by outsourcing their computing needs to highly efficient and optimized third parties. A study conducted by Greenspace, an Illinois-based vendor of green building supplies, found that NetSuite customers who signed up for the company’s Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management software services saved a combined $61 million in energy bills per year. The energy savings, equaling almost 595 million kilowatt-hours, led to avoided greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 423,000 metric tons of CO2.
Cloud computing providers are able to focus their efforts on maximizing the performance and efficiency of their computing operations, and as a result are often able to perform at much higher levels of utilization than individual companies, especially smaller firms with fewer IT resources. In tandem with the release of Greenspace’s research, which is available as a white paper (PDF) from NetSuite’s website, NetSuite has announced a 50 percent discount for new customers subscribing to its software suite. Greenspace, which is also a NetSuite customer, used the research project as an opportunity to develop its EcoMetrics scorecard system, which aims to help businesses accurately assess the green aspects or potential of its operations.
HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. announced today the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing. The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.
HP, Intel and Yahoo! have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation. Intel is a leading provider of platform technologies, including processors, chipsets, networking and SSD (solid state drives), for cloud computing data centers. Current platform features such as Data Center Management Interface (DCMI), Node Manager (NM) and virtualization have been designed to improve the manageability and energy efficiency of data centers. IDA will also leverage the test bed and its industry partnerships to train local students and professionals on the technologies and programs associated with cloud computing.
Yahoo!’s cloud confronts technical challenges at an almost unprecedented scale - requiring tens of petabytes of storage, tens of thousands of machines, and synchronization across multiple data centers around the globe. Shelton Shugar will describe how Yahoo! leverages Cloud Computing to improve agility and drive
innovation in his keynote at SYS-CON’s upcoming 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo being held November 2-4 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Yahoo! is developing and utilizing Internet-scale cloud computing services to improve Yahoo! consumer experience for half a million people around the world, speed the innovation of its developers, simplify operating environments and reduce costs.
Cloud Services store and deliver web content, personalize content for consumers, optimize Ad selection and placement, improve search results, provide scalable virtual computing environments, and process and store enormous amounts of data to improve consumer experiences and drive innovation. Shugar’s keynote will elaborate on how consumers benefit from Yahoo! Cloud Services and he will provide a technical overview. The keynote will set the tone for Day Two of the conference, which is the biggest Cloud-focused event of the year.
