Friday 03 September 2010
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.
A major issue discussed by the panel was the growth of ‘cloud computing’. This is where businesses store all of their data, from company records to other documents online in a secure external server or servers, sometimes known as a cloud of servers. This enables them to do away with costly and space-consuming IT hardware. Experts say that it can save small firms money and allow them to grow faster, therefore competing with their larger rivals. Current estimates are that just five per cent of small firms use cloud computing. Says Alambritis: ‘Two-thirds of start-up firms operate from their home, so space is really an issue, and this is one area cloud computing could help.
It is important to highlight just how big a revolution this is, it will drive greater levels of productivity and change the way we work and live. This is big as the industrial revolution and businesses must see it as an opportunity, not a threat. All members of the panel agreed that the digital revolution currently taking place offered huge opportunities for businesses, in particular for small firms to compete with their larger rivals by using the different technologies effectively.
All of these technologies enable, in one way or another more cool technologies like cloud computing (not the SaaS model, that ain’t cloud), Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), mobility, agile networking, better access controls, green computing, unified communications, and a network that actually configures around a user. I am not going to tell you these technologies are fully baked today. Some, like UC are pretty far along. Others, like CEE and cloud computing, not so much.
Storage is getting denser and faster with drives offering hundreds of GB of SSD storage that reads and writes data faster, runs cooler, and consumes less power. These are initiatives large and small that impact not only what runs over the network, but how the network runs.
In-memory data grids store information that applications need in memory across a pool of servers, instead of reading it off disks, resulting in major performance gains. The Coherence product is one of the more mature in a space occupied by offerings from IBM as well as smaller companies like GigaSpaces and a number of open-source projects. Microsoft is also developing a system dubbed “Velocity.” o date, such systems have breathed rarefied air, mostly supporting large-scale Web sites and high-throughput transactional systems, such as stock trading applications. The in-memory data grid market in total generated less than US$100 million in revenue during 2008, according to Gartner, which prefers the term “distributed caching platforms.
But some observers believe that in-memory approaches to data management could eventually gain serious traction in cloud-computing deployments. The technologies would help applications that weren’t originally designed for elastically scalable infrastructure systems like Amazon Web Services to run more effectively, albeit “via some re-engineering,” Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini said in a recent report. Beyond vendor trepidation, other factors stand in the way of broader customer adoption, such as the complexity of deploying and managing the systems and limited support from systems integrators and ISVs, according to Pezzini.
The topic even had the Economist gushing about cloud computing’s impact on business in their regular technology supplement in October. Analysts have wholeheartedly jumped on the bandwagon with Gartner spreading cloud computing all over its Top 10 strategic technologies list for the coming year, and Yankee group predicting a $20B marketplace for software as a service by 2011. Meanwhile marketeers keen to capitalise on all the attention are sticking a “Cloud Computing” banner over last months “Green Computing” badge in a desperate attempt to sell the same old junk to win a share of an increasingly fickle audiences shrinking IT budget.
Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definitions, use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors. These definitions, attributes, and characteristics will evolve and change over time. The cloud computing industry represents a large ecosystem of many models, vendors, and market niches. This definition attempts to encompass all of the various cloud approaches.
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models. Cloud software takes full advantage of the cloud paradigm by being service oriented with a focus on statelessness, low coupling, modularity, and semantic interoperability.
It was inevitable, and I just missed the release by a few months, however, Microsoft is working hard on releasing the “Private Cloud”, your own on-premises cloud computing software. ith the Microsoft cloud strategy, organizations can now move towards cloud computing models with the confidence that their existing investments in their datacenter are safe, and can be leveraged in this new paradigm. Existing applications and services will be able to move to the private cloud without the need to learn unproven technologies or introduce unnecessary complexity.
Microsoft is enabling customers to build the foundation for a private cloud infrastructure using Windows Server and System Center family of products with the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Enterprises, availability scheduled in the first half of 2010.
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.
For the past 10 years, many technologies we’ve been using reached wide-scale adoption and essentially became commoditized. It’s baffling how many private and public organizations continue to invest large amounts of money for technologies that have reached mainstream status. When it comes to IT, there is a multitude of low-cost, creative ways to make resources available. Which ones are worth considering? Is there a more efficient development approach? How can you effectively combine resources with other government districts? The clear need is to evaluate low-cost resources that save money in the short term and provide proven solutions that are advanced and secure enough to avoid long-term pain. This article delves into practical examples you can start using today to save money, speed development and deliver higher-quality solutions. These technologies aren’t necessarily offering the best value for the investment anymore. They simply help run the institution. In these cases, consider other options to cut costs by using reliable low-cost or free solutions.
Good open source projects have strong communities behind them, and in some cases, build better features and offer better support than the technologies they set out to reproduce. The key to picking an open source project is not basing it on the product’s current features, but by the strength and viability of the community behind it. Commoditized software often comes in the form of open source technology projects. I’m not saying all open source projects are commoditized technologies, but many open source software (OSS) projects spring up because a group of talented developers are tired of paying for services that can be cloned easily.
It’s even more important to analyze the viability of SaaS vendors, since the technologies are relatively closed compared to open source solutions. When evaluating SaaS solutions, it’s important to understand a vendor’s funding/cash position, subscription base and the openness of its platform, in case you want to migrate to a different solution later.
