Friday 03 September 2010
The expanded services give enterprises the option to outsource the management of mission-critical applications to Host.net without making a capital investment in their own servers, significantly reducing costs by sharing network resources. The new service, available immediately, utilizes existing Fairway Consulting Group infrastructure including best-of-breed virtualization technologies. Key Fairway executives have also joined Host.net, providing virtual computing expertise as well as paving the way for development of new joint services. Fairway has provided compute, storage and desktop virtualization services to the SMB and enterprise markets, including Fortune 500 clients, since 2004.
The demand for cloud computing is exploding because of the economics. We have been planning to expand our services to include virtualization for some time,” said Jeffrey Davis, co-founder and CEO of Host.net. “Acquiring Fairway Consulting Group enables us to ramp up quickly, leverage our 50-city footprint, and offer robust, cost-effective cloud computing capabilities that have been road-tested by some of the country’s most demanding companies. We were already using Host.net’s colocation services. It made sense to join forces,” said Jeffrey Slapp, co-founder, president and chief architect of Fairway Consulting Group and now Vice President of Virtualization Services of Host.net.
Matt Rubins, a venture capitalist who invests in enterprise infrastructure and cloud related technologies for Boston-based MC Venture Partners, expects that to change, but not until the young cloud computing platforms mature. Rubins, who holds a BS in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, said cloud computing is a vastly over-used buzz term used to describe a very simple concept; external resources that are provided on a pay as you go basis. IT folks are still skeptical and hesitant to use cloud computing, yet vendors are coming out of the wood-work with their own flavors of cloud platforms. (Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon EC2, VMware’s Virtual Data Center-OS, SalesForce.com, Terremark, and the list continues to grow.
The first stage is to get people comfortable with virtualization, and once that happens, you break down those silos. With virtualization, most people start out using it in testing, then into production, and once comfortable with that, they could move to clouds. We are still a ways away from that. The people who have been using clouds successfully so far are in areas like social media; they put things in the cloud that don’t need five- nines (%99.999), but can live with three-nines of availability and they need to put up and take down CPUs quickly.
Kundra and his team are working on launching a “digital storefront for cloud computing solutions” that would offer for federal and other government buyers an experience that “is the same or similar to the experience that you and I have in our personal lives when we go to online stores like amazon or eBay or any of the other online vendors.”
This move to the cloud is going to be good news for Amazon, RackSpace and Microsoft, all of which we think are going to be competing with with traditional suppliers of information technology to the government. Others say that Terremark, HP, Google, Cisco and various systems integrators could be among the big winners. (GigaOM Pro, our $79-a-year subscription-only research service, has started following these developments closely.) For the U.S. government, cloud computing could be an easy way to deal with urgent and important issues, such as upgrading the federal and state technology infrastructure without costly upgrades. If Kundra is successful in his efforts, then the sheer buying power of the government is going help cloud computing reach a tipping point.
The draft NIST definition, perhaps the best we have at this point, states that “Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. One of the key value propositions for cloud computing is the transfer of expense from the capital (CAPEX) to the operational (OPEX) column. Private clouds can still deliver some of the other benefits of cloud computing, especially for the largest organizations. Private and hybrid clouds can also serve as a gateway, allowing enterprise IT to become familiar and comfortable with cloud computing paradigms in a controlled environment.
This might seem foolish to the average person, or even the travel departments of medium-sized businesses, but the substantial expense might be offset by the convenience or increased productivity of private aviation. Cloud computing is similar: The average individual or organization will probably derive maximum benefit from sharing a public cloud infrastructure, but this should not preclude certain special cases where a private cloud will be called for.
There are several kinds of Cloud Computing service offerings. Here are the most common ones. Common Services. Some products offer Internet-based services—such as storage, middleware, collaboration, and database capabilities—directly to users.
SaaS. Software-as-a-service products provide a complete, turnkey application—including complex programs such as those for CRM or enterprise-resource management—via the Internet.
PaaS. Platform-as-a-service products offer a full or partial development environment that users can access and utilize online, even in collaboration with others.
IaaS. Infrastructure-as-a-service products deliver a full computer infrastructure via the Internet.
DaaS. Desktop-as-a-service which utilize virtualization of desktop systems serving thin clients.
I would never go back to the [traditional] software model. Someone would have to make a very compelling argument for me to even consider it,” said Molly Fuller, president of Hands On Gourmet in San Francisco. Fuller said she struggled for a year with an on-premise software suite designed for catering companies before abandoning her investment in Caterease and switching to Salesforce.com’s hosted customer relationship management (CRM) products. Fuller said hosted services were attractive because they were available everywhere and because they were maintenance-free. She said she uses Salesforce.com to generate menus and logistics for the $1.5 million business, and the online interface allows Hands On Gourmet’s roving squads of chef-instructors, who host cooking classes for corporate events, to get instructions fairly easily. The on-demand pricing made it easy for Hands On Gourmet to switch to Salesforce.com, Fuller said. Although she wouldn’t go back, Fuller said, she didn’t regret her initial use of an in-house product. “I didn’t feel burned by it; I just chalked it up to a lesson.
Corefino’s entire business is in the cloud. CEO Karen Watts said her firm used IBM to host its servers. Corefino’s Web portal serves customers in China and employees in India and elsewhere. Watts said that vendors were as eager as her customers to slough off infrastructure costs to hosters and cloud providers. Market research firm IDC estimated that SaaS spending will jump more than $1.2 billion in 2009 and predicted that it would be close to $20 billion by 2012. Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, said that spending on cloud technologies, primarily SaaS, was rising five times faster than any other IT spending by companies.
Novell’s perspective on the cloud is we envision ourselves as an arms vendor to the cloud. We are not going to be off creating a Novell cloud; we don’t believe we hold that place in the market. Rather, we see people who are: Google, Amazon, Rackspace. They’re going to need infrastructure tools to run their clouds, which is basically the next generation of what a data center is. Because we made a strategic decision as a business on selling to the cloud providers, that’s a small target market, so we can have traditional partners focus on selling to the end customers today, and we can make a small investment in selling to cloud providers and building that relationship because it’s a small universe of people.
Novell transitioning to a very indirect form of business, where our operating system goes to market to the ISVs, our management tools go to market through solution providers or cloud vendors, our security offering goes to market through cloud providers. You’re starting to see an evolution in Novell as an infrastructure/plumbing vendor.
The agreement will make CohesiveFT’s VPN-Cubed® and Elastic Server® product families the preferred cloud server assembly and cloud security and control solutions for the Capgemini Cloud Computing Center of Excellence. Capgemini will now use CohesiveFT’s products as key components of their data center to cloud or hybrid cloud solutions for enterprise customers. “Capgemini is the world’s largest IT professional services company and we are extremely excited to be working with them to help deliver real, production-ready solutions to their clients in the much over-hyped cloud computing space,” said Patrick Kerpan, CohesiveFT CTO. “The combination of the Elastic Server factory and VPN-Cubed gives Capgemini’s clients dynamic cloud server assembly and customer-controlled overlay network capabilities that provide security and control in the clouds. The Cloud Computing Center of Excellence gives clients a much needed repository of enterprise-ready cloud computing solutions available now.” Capgemini’s Cloud Computing Center of Excellence, will help businesses evaluate and implement cloud initiatives by offering cloud consulting and readiness assessments while using existing market leading solutions from its partner companies like CohesiveFT. The center will also train “hundreds” of Capgemini employees on how to provide cloud computing services.
With CohesiveFT’s VPN-Cubed, Capgemini clients will be able to leverage four key capabilities public cloud users currently cannot control: static addressing for their cloud devices; topology control; use of popular enterprise protocols like UDP Multicast for service discovery; and lastly encrypted communications between all devices on the overlay network. Additionally clients using the Elastic Server platform to act as repository for their virtual server’s “bill-of-materials”; will be able to redeploy those servers as often and to as many different cloud and virtual infrastructure execution contexts as desired. “We chose CohesiveFT because it automates and addresses areas of extreme concern for our clients; cross-cloud deployment, and cloud network security and control,” noted Simon Plant, Product Lead, Cloud Computing, Capgemini. “CohesiveFT’s VPN-Cubed and Elastic Server products provide an automated and affordable way for our clients to deploy custom servers to the cloud and easily control those business-critical assets via encrypted connections between existing infrastructure and the cloud.”
Sybase’s mobile platform may provide a cloud-based lifeline for the likes of SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle, providing those legacy enterprise application vendors an entry into the mobile-computing world of the future. Sybase’s big play into cloud computing seems to be from the “client side” in the form of mobile access to applications in the cloud, not the data center side as some might expect. It may be that mobility-platform vendors are some of the biggest winners from the cloud-computing movement, as there is a lot of “work” to be done between the service and the device for most cloud applications. Yes, many cloud applications will be architected with mobility in mind (especially support for the Apple iPhone), and yes, Sybase seems to be targeting more ”traditional” Web and client-server applications, but in general, there is infrastructure that enables mobile phones to connect with cloud back-ends (e.g. 3G/4G, the Apple Store, etc.), and cloud computing could be a huge boon to mobile “glue” vendors that address the opportunity.
IronKey, maker of the world’s most secure flash drives, today announced that over 1,000 companies and government agencies have adopted IronKey secure and intelligent USB flash drives and are managing them remotely using IronKey’s cloud-based Internet security remote management online service. This makes IronKey one of the largest online security SaaS companies in the world. IronKey online security services include Remote management and tracking of IronKey secure intelligent flash drives, Remote kill of lost and stolen devices, Content recovery, password reset and device redeployment, Internet update of software and security updates to IronKey devices, Internet update of anti-virus and anti-malware software on IronKey devices.
Dave Jevans, CEO at IronKey said: “As businesses today carefully assess every dollar they spend, our continued success highlights the growing importance of secure mobile device management services and data protection for organizations large and small. Providing remote management and security services for portable devices over the Internet as a security service helps reduce the costs and overhead for managing these popular devices. Companies can easily manage the security of remote workers by using the IronKey cloud security service, without the hassles and costs associated with installing servers and the continued maintenance of such an infrastructure. Even better, an Internet managed service is ideal for managing mobile workers who could be using their IronKey secure intelligent flash drives from anywhere in the world. The expansion and growth we are experiencing with our channel partners, as well as the continued adoption of IronKey products highlights the value and trust customers place in IronKey devices and online services.
IronKey’s award-winning products and services combine the world’s most secure flash drive with the world’s most powerful USB management software. IronKey’s USB flash drives bring the power of authentication, encryption, identity management and privacy to businesses and consumers in 23 countries. IronKey’s management software and associated services allow enterprises of all sizes, government agencies, the military, and other organizations to take back control of the mobile data that has been leaking out of their organizations due to the uncontrolled proliferation of USB drives.
