Sunday 14 March 2010
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.
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.
Microsoft’s energy management tool, Hohm, which launched this week, is a clear play to help consumers conserve energy. Log into the Hohm web site, enter your ZIP code and other details about your residence, and the service predicts your home energy use (or links to your historical energy use via your utility) and suggests ways to curb it. But Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, explained to us in an interview this week that Azure is expected to be more efficient than standard Web hosting and offer better power utilization, partly because the cloud takes advantage of on-demand scalable computing, growing and shrinking the amount of computing that’s applied to a particular task (and thus power used). In addition, the servers will feature efficient hardware designs and make better use of power management software, Mundie said.
We’ll forgive you if you thought Azure was just an outdated color in a Crayola box. Microsoft (MSFT) announced the cloud computing platform more than six months ago, and while few details are known about it, what is known is that it will be used by companies that want to deploy large Web services and host them in a cloud computing model. In the past, Microsoft would have allocated a couple of data centers to house Hohm, said Mundie. In that model, even if it were the middle of the night, the Web service would grind away in case there was a visitor. That meant it would be using more energy than needed. But with Azure’s setup, the servers are more like a car with different cylinders. “When they go uphill, we’ll turn them on, and when we’re coasting downhill, we’ll turn them off,” said Mundie.
However the networked computing world is tweaked, at the end of the day, it needs to more closely focus on using as little energy as possible. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, data centers currently consume 1.5% of total U.S. electricity, and that percentage is poised to more than double by 2011. In an increasingly broadband-connected world, in which a growing amount of our media, commerce, communications, and work life will be hosted in the cloud, energy conservation in IT will become extremely important. And who knows? Hohm’s legacy of being the first external Web service hosted on the energy-efficient Azure platform could stretch beyond its practical intentions to help reduce global energy consumption.
IBM Cloud Computing
IBM announces establishing the first IBM cloud computing laboratory in Hong Kong. The company said that the new facility will provide a global hub for web-based messaging services to support IBM’s emerging LotusLive cloud service portfolio, which offers company-to-company social networking and on-line collaboration tools.
The new lab will be located in Hong Kong’s Cyberport complex, an information technology centre developed to foster innovation within the Asia-Pacific region. IBM also announced the closing of the acquisition of Outblaze Limited’s messaging assets. Outblaze operates an on-line service platform for the provision of secure, private-label e-mail, collaboration and social media services to other service providers, telecomms operators, corporations, academia, media and publishing companies.
LotusLive.com has been designed to help businesses work smarter by forming virtual communities in the cloud, connecting colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers. The Outblaze asset purchase adds web-based e-mail to IBM’s portfolio of on-line collaboration tools, enabling subscribers to easily provision e-mail accounts and users to access their e-mail from any computer through any web browser.
