Thursday 29 July 2010
In high tech as elsewhere, it’s often a matter of historical accident and political maneuvering that determines which approach wins out in a particular area of technology. And it can be a high-stakes game for the companies involved, with big players often seeking to position their approach as a “standard” even if it’s only standard in the sense of being ubiquitous (think Microsoft Windows) while the smaller guys tend to favor approaches blessed by standards bodies or at least industry corsortia. In cloud computing, we’re seeing almost all the forms of standards-making coming into play with the primary goal of promoting interoperability among different cloud service providers and between private and public clouds. On the de jure side, the most significant standards-making effort is taking place under the auspices of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), an established organization in the management standards space. AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Savvis, Sun Microsystems, and VMware announced in April 2009 (PDF) that they would comprise the board for an Open Cloud Standards Incubator within the DMTF.
And it’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) that has clearly emerged as the de facto standard for IaaS. The fact that Amazon is one of the first vendors that comes to mind in just about any discussion of public clouds is one indication. Another is the growing ecosystem of companies like RightScale that add additional features to AWS–not uniquely, but first and foremost. We now even have an open-source project and company, Eucalyptus, that lets organizations implement their own clouds that are compatible with many AWS services. This announcement doesn’t fundamentally change the landscape. However, it does give an already well-established IaaS vendor a point of clear differentiation from its biggest competitor.
What we need is a nuts and bolts, sound-proofed room, gathering of the minds and Linux thought leaders to discuss Linux, its current state, its legal standing and its future as an operating system. I’m not talking about a nice little get together with keynote speakers with high-powered, 10,000 foot views of where Linux is and where it’s going. And I’m not talking about vendor booths touting the latest and greatest Linux toys or big blowout parties from a spectacle-making platinum sponsor.
What we need is a nuts and bolts, sound-proofed room, gathering of the minds and Linux thought leaders to discuss Linux, its current state, its legal standing and its future as an operating system. It’s time to get serious. It’s time to put aside our petty differences with the likes of Microsoft and Apple and just take care of business–the business of producing an operating system. It’s time to focus on the future.
We need key players and contributors from Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Novell, Debian, Ubuntu, The Linux Foundation, Slackware, CentOS, Oracle, IBM, HP, Intel, AMD, VMware and Citrix to come together and hash out a grand plan for this once niche operating system that’s grown up into the enterprise-level beast that has changed the world.
Cloud computing news we see some of the concerns in adopting this new paradigm, even as some of the largest business and government entities adopt (or seek to provide) cloud computing services. We can easily see vendors like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, HP, IBM, Unisys, and many others jockeying for position. Having worked for a vendor I can state confidently that nowadays they make their moves based on demand, not “build it and they will come” wishful thinking. That demand is coming from your competitors, and sooner or later, those cost savings will show up in the form of more competitive pricing of goods and services making it more difficult to compete for those that don’t adopt these efficiencies.
Using the GSA Storefront, federal agencies would choose infrastructure, Web applications, or other IT services to begin a streamlined procurement process. t’s at the top of the hype charts. It probably won’t save you money, especially in the short term. It needs more standards. And, it’s going to transform the economic model for computing. It, of course, is cloud computing — one of the most powerful business computing trends we’ve seen in years.
IBRIX provides enterprise-class file serving software designed for data protection, high availability and cloud computing environments. The deal comes as EMC won Data Domain for $2.1 billion. EMC outbid NetApp for the company. In a nutshell, storage giants are gobbling up smaller companies to round out their portfolios and get ahead of trends. These hardware players are also chasing growth—storage is one of the few bright spots in a declining market. In a statement, HP said the IBRIX deal is designed to position the company better in the cloud storage market. IBRIX, an HP partner for the last three years, has 53 employees and 175 enterprise customers in multiple verticals.
Entrepreneurial opportunities abound as this classic disruptive technology begins to proliferate, so it is no surprise that SYS-CON’s industry-leading International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is going from strength to strength. Now held three times a year, in New York, Prague, and Silicon Valley, the event unfailingly attracts unprecedented numbers of developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.
With an ever-increasing number of companies now buying computing, storage, and networking power as they need it from the cloud, there has never been a greater need for a one-stop event that brings together players from the main layers of the Cloud ecosystem - the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications. Our organizing principle is that through our intensive 3-day schedule of keynotes, general and breakout sessions, attending delegates will be assured of leaving the Conference with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging the Cloud, helping them to maximize performance, minimize cost and improve the scale of their endeavors.
The East Coast version of this event featured 100+ technical sessions from the leading industry players including Amazon, Sun, IBM, HP, Yahoo!, Salesforce, 3tera, Egenera, RightScale, Elastra, CohesiveFT, Cisco, Trend Micro, and many, many more.
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.
The signing ceremony was witnessed by Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Datuk Dr Maximus Ongkili, they said in a joint statement here Tuesday. They said Mimos joined Open Cirus as a test bed site to help advance cloud computing research and education. It would develop a national cloud computing platform to deploy services throughout Malaysia, focusing on enabling services through software, security frameworks and mobile interactivity, as well as testing new cloud tools and methodologies. Launched in July 2008, the Open Cirrus initiative is aimed at promoting open collaboration among industries, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, internet-scale computing.
Malaysia has made major strides in advancing ICT development in the country with the establishment of MSC Malaysia and the Ministry of Science, Technology and innovation. Cloud computing is the next step. With a headstart in our involvement in cloud computing research, Malaysia will be able to reap the benefits as an early adopter. Besides Malaysia, Open Cirrus has test bed sites in United States, Singapore, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia and South Korea. The test bed stimulates a real-life, global, internet-scale environment and gives researchers an unprecedented ability to test applications and measure the performance of infrastructure and services built to run on large-scale cloud systems.
The job of standing up and managing the network, awarded in 2000, has proved to be challenging for both parties, and the Navy Department chose not to renew the contract when it expires in 2010, opting for more in-house control. Ann Livermore is executive vice president of HP’s Technology Solutions Group, which oversees EDS and HP’s storage, servers, software and services. We spoke with her about lessons about NMCI and Oracle’s recent purchase of HP competitor Sun Microsystems.
Any time you have a very large outsourcing relationship and any time you have a customer where you have a very, very broad set of things you are doing for [that customer], there are a handful of things that are really important [to keep in mind]. They apply to NMCI, as well as other relationships. The second lesson is the need to balance security and the operations. You have to ensure that you can have the flexibility in your operations and yet ensure you have the very tight security that you need. You have to be pushing on those enhancements and improvements. One of the things we do with NMCI is always evaluate new technologies.
Through a partnership with HP, HP’s LoadRunner testing tool can now be used to build test scenarios that will tax an application’s limits. The tests can be set up, managed and torn down through HP’s Quality Center, which is able to launch them in a Skytap cloud. The tests run as virtual workloads under VMware’s ESX Server. Cloud vendor Skytap this week said it has joined forces with Hewlett-Packard to make it easier to stress test your new software with hundreds or thousands of simulated end users in the cloud, without taxing your data center.
Another way to use Virtual Lab and Quality Center is for developers at a U.S. company to produce code that’s tested by a team in Mumbai, India. By storing the tests and their results, Virtual Lab can show where the application fails by letting the developers call up the stored tests and run them again to the break point. Skytap users can also use HP Cloud Assure, an HP offering that helps customers safely implement cloud services. Cloud Assure lets an application be evaluated through software-as-a-service services for security and performance, before it goes into production.
HP Quality Center is software that imposes standard procedures on each round of software testing. It maintains testing and release cycles for software under development, and builds testing around risk factors to the business. It can deploy test environments in the cloud when in-house resources are already fully committed, removing a test and development bottleneck, said Tim Van Ash, director of products for HP Software as a Service.
Platform Computing, the leader in grid and cloud computing software, today announces the appointment of technology industry veteran John Egan to its board of directors. In this role, Mr. Egan will provide guidance to Platform as the company focuses on its cloud computing strategy and prepares to deliver a fundamental new product to the market later this year. To this end, Mr. Egan’s experience with EMC and VMware is considered to be relevant and valuable.
As a Managing Partner at Egan-Managed Capital, John plays an active role in technology startups and supports the growth and recruiting activities of portfolio companies. He currently serves on the board of directors of NetScout Systems, HighRoads, EPiCON, CenterStone Software, HighGround Systems, Lineo, Monetrics, Novera Software, and Caldera Systems. Platform’s long history in grid computing enables the company to further extend its industry leadership and bring a private enterprise cloud computing solution to the market,” said Mr. Egan. “It’s an exciting time of innovation and growth at Platform, and I look forward to working with the Platform team and helping them get to the company to the next level of success.
Over 2,000 of the world’s largest organizations rely on our solutions to improve IT productivity and reduce data center costs. Platform has strategic relationships with Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Building on 16 years of market leadership, Platform continues to help data centers be more efficient, responsive and dynamic
