Saturday 13 March 2010
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.
The federal government is going to open its own online cloud store where agencies can shop for cloud computing infrastructure, web applications and services paid for by credit card or requisition. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra anticipates the wares will be segmented into software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, platforms-as-a-service and citizen engagement services.
Rackspace Hosting Inc.’s (RAX) flight into cloud computing has hit some turbulence, as a couple recent service outages have knocked down the high-flying stock, but the manager of corporate data is seen resuming its ascension. Since early last year, the San Antonio-based company has spent nearly $290 million, or more than half its 2008 revenue, on equipment to build up its hosting and cloud computing services, which allow companies to access computing tasks through the Web. The spending has put Rackspace in a favorable position, even against bigger rivals, in an increasingly competitive market and has contributed.
Through the open, standards-based API, Rackspace Cloud customers can now manage their cloud infrastructure with greater control and flexibility. The API, for example, enables elastic scenarios as users can write code that programmatically detects load and scales the number of server instances up and down. The
Rackspace Cloud solicited feedback and conducted intensive testing with its partners and cloud developers to help ensure that the community shaped the API.
Users now have control panel and programmatic access to the company’s cloud infrastructure services: Cloud Servers, Cloud Files and Slicehost. The Cloud Servers API is implemented using a RESTful web service interface. Aiming to build a cohesive approach to all products in the Rackspace Cloud suite, Cloud Servers shares a common token authentication system that allows seamless access between products and services.
Launched earlier this year, Cloud Servers is a compute service that provides server capacity in the cloud to businesses of all sizes and leverages key technology developed by Slicehost, LLC, a Rackspace wholly-owned subsidiary. Until today, interactions with Cloud Servers only occurred via the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel (GUI) and now programmatically via the Cloud Servers API.
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.
SYS-CON Media announced today that nominations are now open for its first annual Government IT Readers’ Choice Awards. SYS-CON’s Readers’ Choice Awards, also known as the “Oscars of the Software Industry,” has been one of the most prestigious industry award programs for more than a decade. This year’s Government IT awards will be given in 11 categories and award-winning products and services. The i-Technology professionals who constitute the dedicated readers of SYS-CON.com’s many sites relevant to Government IT are personally, professionally, and often passionately involved in the front-line of Internet technologies.
Their recognition is hard to win,” said Jeremy Geelan, Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media. “That is why we are so excited to be launching these Readers’ Choice awards, an open competition that gives everyone an equal chance, no matter what part of the GovIT ecosystem they inhabit, of giving recognition to the solutions and services they commend the most.” The nominations deadline is August 16, 2009, and voting will begin August 17, 2009, and end September 18, 2009. Winners will be announced by October 6, 2009.
Alatum provides “a network of on-demand applications, services and storage and computational components over the Internet. The service is powered by 24,000 processors and employs 16 terabytes of storage space, offering minimal set up and maintenance of hardware and software applications, with no need to own servers and expansive data centre infrastructure. The company is founded on a project awarded to SingTel by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore back in June 2008. The company markets itself as “a collaboration between SingTel and leading technology providers to provide commercial grid computing services to business enterprises and public sector agencies,” adding ‘the team will deliver software, computing power and storage as a pay-per-use, on-demand, on-line services to customers.” So far, the company has introduced two levels of services, a platform-as-a-service offering and a software-as-a-service product. For the PaaS service, subscription options include a server-based pricing package still in the testing phase, and a per-CPU package. Prices start at S$434 for a single core server per month, to packages that include 8 processor cores, 16GB of memory and 80GB of storage, for S$3,520 per month.
Additional memory costs S$25/month while storage is priced at S$6 a month for 10GB. A second subscription option called, HPC (high-performance computing) is priced at S$0.51 per hour per CPU, and S$0.60 per 1GB of storage per month. Both packages require subsequent fees for memory - as in RAM, and storage, as well as a one-time set up charge of S$500.There is little pricing or product-related information on the SaaS component of the offering, except the applications will range across accounting and finance, with the ability scale quickly to meet user demands. Technology partners for Alatum include: Citrix, Oracle, RedHat, Microsoft and Platform Computing, who will provide its virtual management and high performance software to the company. Working with many of world’s premier IT providers such as Platform Computing, we have created a computing platform for commercial and public sector organizations to cost effectively access the best and most advanced technologies, applications and services.
In the government’s Digital Britain report published yesterday, Carter said the so-called “G-Cloud” should be created within the next three years, to allow local and central government departments to share centrally hosted applications. The CIO Council and UK IT trade association Intellect are currently developing a business case for funding the G-Cloud. Savings could come from cutting the number of government datacentres and reducing overall hardware spend, slashing software licensing costs and lowering maintenance and security costs by using a standardised platform.
SMEs supplying services to the government would also benefit from the G-Cloud model, with the report saying they “would be able to provide services running on standardised, secure infrastructure without having to incur the costs of establishing and accrediting their own infrastructure”. But peer Lord Merlin Hay, a member of the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee, warned spending money on large IT projects is no substitute for reforming the way government departments work together. If they have to redesign systems to run in the cloud then I can see it turning into another huge IT project, with consultants seeing another opportunity to charge the government large sums of money.
Private clouds allow organisations to easily manage their own hardware resources in-house. Using virtualization technology they can alter the provided computing to suit the work at hand. This makes it easier for them to provide the necessary infrastructure for their users, even if these needs change rapidly over time. In the future this approach could help sites to increase their resources by using commercial cloud providers during peak loads. The two teams will work together to explore how the institutes providing computing resources to EGEE could benefit from adopting a ‘private cloud’ model to provide resources.
The RESERVOIR virtualisation manager builds on the open source project OpenNebula which has been developed at the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The group’s aim is to make management of cloud resources easier using virtual machine technology. RESERVOIR offers the ability for EGEE sites to easily meet the changing needs of the users, from scaling-up services to meet peak loads and improving redundancy, to changing the resources provided to run particular applications.
It enables users to directly procure services from the cloud, and it eliminates the need for more time-consuming, labor-intensive, human-driven procurement processes familiar to many in IT. That being said, the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance strikes a nice balance between self-service access and security. This balance enables WebSphere CloudBurst users to perform the actions to which they are authorized with the services to which they are authorized.
WebSphere CloudBurst provides this capability by allowing for the definition of users of the system. Each user defined within the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance has from one to five roles. That’s not to say that a cloud computing solution should provide its services in a free-for-all manner, letting any user take any action within the system. There should be strict controls over the services users have access to and the actions they can perform with those services. This is the only way to ensure that such solutions can actually stand up to the rigors of an enterprise environment.
