Monday 15 March 2010
Cloud Computing: An Assessment Report is now offered by Research and Markets
Cloud Computing: An assessment is a comprehensive international study from Coda
Research Consultancy. By drawing upon research and interviews with IT executives
and users, it looks at what IT buyers and users need from cloud services and
suppliers, what suppliers need to know about users and the emerging market, and
the future trajectories of cloud computing from 2011 through to 2020.
Key Topics Covered:
* Executive summary
* Introduction
* Definitions and drivers
* What users want and suppliers need to know
* Costs
* Security
* Vendor lock-in
* International law and regulation
* Formalised procedures
* Understanding employees
* In considering moving to cloud services, and cloud governance
* Contenders for cloud services
* The future
* Conclusion
Companies Mentioned:
* Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
* Amazon Simple Storage System
* Amazon Web Services
* BT Counterpane
* Citrix
* Diomede
* eBay
* Facebook
* Flickr
* Free Software Foundation
* General Electric
* Google Apps
* Google Docs
* Gmail
* GoToMyPC
* and more…
For more information visit
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3313de/cloud_computing_a
Research and Markets
Laura Wood, Senior Manager,
press@researchandmarkets.com
U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907
Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716
Database in the Cloud
Joyent, the leading vendor in Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing, announced today that it is taking the proven performance and reliability of Sun Microsystems’ MySQL database to a whole new level by offering optimizations to the Joyent Cloud for MySQL. Joyent and Sun’s database group have teamed up to create Virtual Appliance templates for MySQL.
Joyent’s Virtual Appliance for MySQL is configured to maximize the open source database’s performance on Joyent’s powerful, secure and stable virtualization technology. Performance benchmarks (http://www.joyent.com/mysql) demonstrate that Joyent’s Virtual Appliance for MySQL can deliver 3 times the number of Transactions per Second than comparable deployments of XEN-based clouds, such as Amazon’s EC2.
“Running Read-Only tests, our internal benchmarks show that a 1GB Virtual Appliance for MySQL in the Joyent cloud can perform 1,245 transactions per second with 8 threads,” said Jason Hoffman, Joyent CTO and Founder. “A more expensive 7.5 GB large instance on Amazon EC2 only manages 425 transactions per second with the same 8 threads.”
Joyent has made it easy to launch a Virtual Appliance for MySQL as a single instance or as part of a Web-scale architecture.
“MySQL is pre-installed and optimized on the Joyent Cloud,” said Hoffman. “From the minute you get your login credentials, you are ready to go: deployment could not be easier. Dual-Master or Master-Slave configurations will also soon be available as pre-defined architectures.”
The Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL is available based on a typical cloud model. Users can scale up and down when they need to — and pay for only the infrastructure they use. There are no contracts to lock-in users. Additionally, the Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL Enterprise is fully supported by the MySQL database experts at Sun.
“MySQL is the most-used database in today’s Cloud environments,” said Rich Nigro, MySQL Managed Hosting Business Manager, Sun Microsystems. “We are delighted to see that Joyent is making this dedicated MySQL offering available to users of the popular Joyent Cloud.”
The Joyent Cloud has many customers benefiting from MySQL, and there are several case studies of how the optimized implementation has driven application performance, operational stability and value.
“Context Optional provides scalable solutions for brand marketing across social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter,” said Rafi Jacoby, Director of Engineering at Context Optional. “We’ve built and deployed viral applications for Kraft, Toyota, McDonald’s, MTV/Viacom, and many other Fortune 500 brands using MySQL running on the Joyent Cloud. We’ve been impressed with performance and uptime, with several databases having run more than a billion queries with no downtime.”
MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world. Many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, communications networks, and commercial software. At http://www.mysql.com, Sun provides corporate users with premium subscriptions and services, and actively supports the large MySQL open source developer community.
About Joyent, Inc.
Joyent is a vendor of ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS), a.k.a Cloud Computing. Joyent provides a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to buying and running your own IT infrastructure, while still providing all the security, cost stability, and enterprise-grade performance of a dedicated private data center. The Joyent Cloud is built using the company’s unique networking and virtualization technology, the Joyent Accelerator. Joyent’s shared hosting, virtual appliances, free developer programs and Cloud Computing products leverage the Joyent Accelerator to provide our customers with unparalleled Cloud Computing performance and value.
Joyent was founded in 2004 with a seed investment from co-founder and CEO David Young and Pay Pal co-founder Peter Thiel. Since then, Joyent has grown organically and has been completely funded by revenue. Joyent’s customers include LinkedIn, Major League Baseball, Gilt.com, Facebook, and 20,000 other companies ranging from small development shops to large Fortune 500 enterprise users. Joyent powers 25% of the daily application traffic on Facebook. www.joyent.com
The program works with IBM and Google on their Cloud Computing University initiative, and is designed to look at the infrastructure requirements to make leading-edge cloud computing system which many believe will power the next generation of the World Wide Web. The scope of this project is enormous. Just reading the synopsis of what will be studied is impressive enough, let alone the actual research behind it. And the cloud computing nature of the project relates to the extremely large data sets that are being generated today. These include total website data and materials which can be mined for usable information, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, along with shopping trends seen on major online retailers.
The universities receiving money include: Carnegie-Mellon, Florida International, MIT, University of Wisconsin, Yale, Purdue, UC-Irvine, UC-San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC-Santa Barbara, University of Maryland-College Park, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Utah. Corporations include IBM and Google on their “Cloud Computing University Initiative”, which serves as a type of spear-head group for the project’s goals and focuses results on industry-oriented needs. The National Science Foundation has published a flash video which, in a news-style interview format with University of Maryland’s Mihai Pop, assistant professor of computer science, explains the process.
Today, the computer giant is launching a new service at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Called Sametime 3D, this virtual world is mundane and workaday on purpose. Instead of exotic islands and futuristic nightclubs, IBM’s digital universe features conference tables, a gigantic appointment calendar, and a flip chart. At least one of the avatars, the computer-created characters that stand in for real people using the service, is wearing a tie. This unlikely business product is one of three new projects from the Boston-area IBM Lotus team, all designed to offer the appeal of the latest personal software ideas in office applications.
Besides the virtual world, the group’s products include Twitter-like “micro-blogging’’ as part of a Facebook-style social networking application, and a service that enables “cloud computing’’ - using remote computers connected by the Internet to do work that has traditionally been performed on a local machine. Sametime 3D enables users of Lotus’s instant-messaging client, Sametime, to set up and use virtual meeting spaces, select colleagues from their Lotus Sametime contact list, and invite them to take part in a virtual meeting. LotusLive Connections, which will be available next week, brings some trendy cloud-computing features to Lotus users, allowing them to share documents and data that are hosted “in the cloud’’ - meaning, on easily accessible Web servers. IBM’s Lotus is not alone in adding Web 2.0 features. Microsoft’s SharePoint product, which competes with Lotus, does not have virtual places or micro-blogging, but it has incorporated Web 2.0 features like blogs, wikis, and Facebook -style networking.
Andreas Bechtolsheim, 53, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. where he still consults — knows a thing or two about cloud computing. He’s chief development officer for Arista Networks Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that supplies networking equipment used to build these massive arrays of computer servers.
Although most have never heard of cloud computing, many do it every day. By uploading photos to Facebook, sending messages via Gmail or playing Club Penguin online, users are accessing programs and software files that are kept far away in cavernous, climate-controlled rooms containing thousands of computers. He also was one of the first people to invest in Google in 1998 when the company was just two Stanford geeks with a laptop. His $100,000 investment in the company started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped turn the Birkenstock-wearing engineer into a billionaire. Hollywood uses high-performance clusters to render movies. The advantage of the cloud is that it’s always running and not idle. They get much better utilization.
These computer farms can simulate car crashes, render movies. Facebook also does an enormous amount of computing behind the scenes to generate relevant content to you. That’s what is going on inside the cloud farms. What you see is just what is relevant to you. You get convenience. You don’t have to deal with servers, data storage or big expensive computers. The laptop accesses everything. You don’t have to worry about backup or security; it’s all being handled by the company that manages the cloud.
So people built these dark pages behind the Web page to game the system. As a result, the search results became useless, and doing a high-quality search was impossible. I was just interested in getting better search results. After I heard from Larry and Sergey about their idea, I rushed out to my car to get my checkbook. The company didn’t exist yet. So I wrote them a check and said, “Here’s a check to get you started.”
The Cannes organizers have added new categories in recent years, like design and PR, to keep up with these changes. But I believe we’ll soon need new categories to honor marketing programs that are technology driven. Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in IT circles, but it should be equally discussed among marketers. It’s another technology trend that’s already having a tremendous impact on consumers. And where consumers go, marketers need to follow. Cloud computing is fueling intense interest as a way to reduce technology costs within organizations.
But the same dynamics can fuel savings in marketing costs by enabling brands to shift to a new, ongoing dynamic with consumers, one that doesn’t rely on the costly media expenditures of our campaign-centric advertising world. Let’s start with some simple definitions. When we speak about “the cloud,” we’re referring to any kind of Internet-based service that allows its users to upload, store and share personal “stuff” online. If you upload a video to YouTube, that video is in the cloud. If you upload a photo album to Flickr, those photos are in the cloud. If you sign up for Facebook or MySpace,
The final barriers to technology adoption are cost and simplicity, and the cloud has an answer to both. On the cost side, netbooks are lowering the bar of affordability for people and entire societies that could not previously afford the power of technology. On the simplicity side, everything you do in the cloud is accessed through a Web browser or a mobile application. There is absolutely no reason why brands can’t get into this game. At its core, cloud-based marketing is powered by a simple idea: be useful to your customers and they in turn will be loyal to your brand. The cloud is a massive engine of technological utility, with myriad ways to be useful to customers.
Retail/Infrastructure company recently leased a 110,000 square foot property in northern Virginia to expand its data center footprint. More than 500,000 developers are now using AWS, and Amazon’s S3 storage now houses more than 50 billion objects. But the data center expansion may also reflect Amazon’s ambitions to host cloud applications for the federal government. Last week Amazon’s AWS Federal unit held training sessions for IT contractors who already have relationships with federal customers.
Amazon is building out its own infrastructure in its new facility in northern Virginia. Amazon buys a large volume of servers to support its cloud computing operations. It was the top customer for Rackable Systems/SGI in 2008, buying more than $86 million of the company’s cloud-optimized servers and storage. Last week Amazon’s AWS Federal unit held training sessions for IT contractors who already have relationships with federal customers.
While other cloud builders like Facebook add computing capacity by leasing turn-key “wholesale” data center space to save time and money, Amazon is building out its own infrastructure in its new facility in northern Virginia. The company also has international data center operations in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Amazon revealed those locations as part of its CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). Amazon offers “availability zones” that allow developers to store a copy of their site or application at a second location in case a data center is knocked offline - which happened last week when a lightning strike damaged the power distribution system at an Amazon facility, knocking EC2 customers offline for about four hours.
AJAX, rich internet applications, enterprise mashups, social media and Web 2.0 find their new place in the Cloud. “Facebook established itself as the new and improved tool for Myspace users and Ulitzer will establish itself as the new, much improved, dynamic, and three dimensional version of Wikipedia with live content,” said Fuat Kircaali, founder of Ulitzer, Inc. “Ulitzer is an original and unique tool for readers who seek quality content on any subject, and written by the leading authorities in their fields. ” Ulitzer is designed to replace Wikipedia with Its three-dimensional live content offerings and dynamic topic structure.
Initiating content coverage on any topic or launching a magazine at Ulitzer.com is designed to be as easy as boiling an egg and doesn’t take much longer. To become a Ulitzer author, anyone can fill out a simple author profile and submit for editorial review and approval. Once you’ve been handed the keys, you will be able to associate your future Web presence to whichever topic or topics suit you best. Ulitzer is a brand new way of creating, delivering, and consuming content on the Web. Anyone can create topics, magazines, and subject-based portals on Ulitzer, pre-populate them with over one million articles available, and launch a new Ulitzer topic in minutes.
To update your existing SYS-CON author profile, simpy log in and request your temporary password to be emailed to you. If you have any difficulty in obtaining your temporary password, please contact editorial (at) sys-con.com for assistance. Once assigned, these Topics will always be available to you. Every time you complete a new item, just return to the Topics tab and click on which of the six Topic sites (including all of them) you want the items to appear on. Requests are subject to approval but you do not usually have to wait more than a couple of hours, tops.
