Friday 03 September 2010
Enterprises large and small are drawn by the advantages of cloud computing pay-for-use, self-service, elastic scalability and the elimination of hardware management – resulting in very low barriers to entry and exit and high agility. However, enterprises are also concerned about security, quality of service, integration, compliance, lock-in, and the long-term costs of public clouds.
Private clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can however mitigate these concerns by giving the enterprise greater control. In a keynote address to be given at SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Richard Sarwal (pictured), SVP of Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, will explore how enterprises are likely to adopt public and private cloud computing, building on a foundation of virtualization infrastructure and management systems. At the 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, November 2-4, 2009, being held in the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA, more than 1,500 delegates will find out how cloud computing is transforming the way that enterprises everywhere build and deploy applications.
The Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, a day-long virtual forum hosted by Red Hat, will gather together open source cloud computing developers for a day of technical presentations that cover the capabilities and challenges facing the development, management and deployment of open source cloud computing configurations. It is generally agreed that open source software is already taking a leadership role in the world of cloud computing, but much work remains to be done. Today, we’ve posted the presentation agenda for the forum. The day will comprise a dozen short, high-impact presentations, enabling attendees to gain an appreciation of the breadth of ongoing development with open source clouds. We hope that the forum will act as a catalyst for open source communities to work together and grow, and encourage participation in the development of open source cloud computing. The forum will be held in an online webinar format, with all presentations recorded and available for playback.
Founded in 2000, IBrix, in Billerica, Mass., has 53 employees and more than 175 corporate customers spanning the communications, media, entertainment, Internet, oil and gas, healthcare, life sciences and financial services industries. HP uses the company’s technology in several products, including StorageWorks storage area networks, ProLiant servers, BladeSystems and ProCurve Ethernet switches and management software. IBrix provides HP with another piece of technology to grab a slice of the growing cloud-computing market. The computing architecture provides dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. Examples include Salesforce.com’s software-as-a-service offering, and Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service business.
Cloud computing involves massive scale-out of servers, which present challenges in software development, deployment, management, security and more. IBrix’s key product Fusion includes a “highly scalable parallel file system with data protection, high availability features and a comprehensive management interface,” according to IBrix. The technology can handle data-intensive application environments involving 10s of petabytes of data. HP did not disclose financial details. The deal is expected to be completed within 30 days. HP plans to integrate IBrix into the StorageWorks division of HP’s Technology Solutions Group. HP announced the agreement about a week after storage rival EMC agreed to buy Data Domain, a maker of technology that reduces the amount of duplicated data stored. EMC agreed to pay $2.4 billion for the deduplication specialist.
As I look at each of these areas of innovation, it is pretty clear that each have a relationship with cloud computing. For instance, automating the provisioning of IT resources and effectively managing that automation are two of the key concepts of cloud computing. No more waiting around for an ”administrator” to provision extra storage, compute power, software, etc., the cloud computing solution takes care of that within the context of some management and governance. By putting solutions in place that allow applications to grow and shrink based on demand, we deliver a more efficient, responsive experience. The ways in which vendors deliver those elastic applications and other software is radically changing. The fourth of the areas of innovation is perhaps a direct consequence of cloud computing. Cloud computing often entails a utility-based pricing model in which users only pay for what they use.
Finally, the last area of innovation Kareem mentioned was cloud-based services. The tie-in to cloud computing here is obvious, but it was interesting to note the emphasis on service. Cloud computing technology is cool stuff, but at the end of the day that technology must provide a useful service. It’s useful cloud-based services that will spur the adoption of cloud computing, not cool technology. In particular, I’ll be curious as to how innovation in these areas is influenced by cloud computing and vice versa.
Symantec Managed Endpoint Protection Services takes endpoint protection to new heights, adding hosted monitoring and management capabilities: “In the same way we’re able to monitor network-based security incidents, the service will allow us to monitor what’s occurring at endpoints,” explained Grant Geyer, vice president of managed services for Symantec, in a chat with RCPU this week. This week, the mega-vendor took the notion a step further and launched new endpoint-protection capabilities into the cloud. (Oh, OK, so “launched into the cloud” isn’t the cleverest turn of phrase you’ve ever read in RCPU. It’s been raining here in Greater Boston for days on end, and our phrase-turning abilities rely on some amount of sunshine.
Symantec can also manage the endpoint-security system in the cloud so that a company doesn’t have to pay IT pros to do that work. Geyer says that the management capability will be especially helpful for companies that are losing headcount (or need to lose headcount) due to budget cuts and don’t want to dedicate IT folks to keeping endpoint security up to date. Architecturally speaking, Symantec deploys a software package (including the Symantec Endpoint Protection software product) at a customer’s site. The package includes a management console and a small agent. Symantec will offer its hosted management and monitoring services on a subscription basis, of course, and while Geyer said that the company would charge by blocs of 2,500 users — this stuff is for big enterprises, not for SMBs — he didn’t put a dollar figure on how much companies would pay per month for the services. For partners, it’s harder to say how good a deal it will end up being. Uncertainty has been a major part of the cloud-computing picture for the channel thus far, and this new service seems to offer more of the same.
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