Sunday 14 March 2010
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.
What’s unique about the Windows Azure platform is that Microsoft manages the complexity, which allows partners to focus on what matters most for their business - building innovative services solutions and driving new revenue.” With those words, Bob Muglia (pictured), president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, today announced how Microsoft’s entry into the cloud computing marketplace aims to drive down total cost of ownership by up to 60 percent for certain workloads during a three-year period.
Since their initial introduction of multi-core processors for the server market, AMD wanted to help IT managers reduce datacenter energy costs without compromising performance. These processors are specifically designed to address rising demand for balanced systems with increased performance yet greater power-efficiency for cloud computing and web serving environments. They are the highest performance-per-watt processors that AMD has ever brought to market. This feature will help drive down power consumption while addressing the shifting cloud and Web landscape of today’s datacenter.
The new Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processors are well suited for Web serving and cloud computing workloads and are available with the same AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology and AMD-P technology features and advanced I/O capabilities as the standard power Six-Core AMD Opteron processors. These new processors also offer up to 18 percent lower platform-level power consumption over the standard wattage version. Additionally they deliver up to 18 percent better performance-per-watt compared to the quad-core version.
IBM, as for other IT vendors hyping the trend toward “cloud computing,” most real-world products have yet to match promises. Even as the company announced a lofty cloud computing road map last month, that plan to centralize companies’ information technology resources in hyper-efficient data centers either on-site or on IBM’s premises–has only taken shape in tame Web software offerings and a testing platform for software developers. IBM’s cloud-computing projects until now have been “low-hanging fruit,” says Clementi. “But analytics lends itself to cloud computing.
IBM will offer to handle specific data-intensive workloads as a service: tasks that often require large amounts of storage, including customer behavior analysis for better marketing, financial risk assessment, supply chain management or fraud detection. By offering those services in a pay-as-you-go model over the Internet, companies will be able to scale up their IT resources for occasional bursts of analysis. Companies can hoard large amounts of information far more efficiently in an off-site setup, where economies of scale and virtualization software make storage more efficient.
As companies attempt to control costs and use resources more wisely, IDC estimates that the market for business analytics software will swell to $26.1 billion this year, growing 7.8% over 2008. But IBM is putting significant muscle behind its new offerings. The new cloud analytics push will likely tie in software offerings from its acquisition of the French business optimization outfit ILOG last year, as well as business intelligence firm Cognos ( COGN - news - people ), which IBM acquired in 2007 for $5 billion, its largest buyout ever.
RightScale’s system ensures that applications are available in the cloud, manages their performance, detects faults, issues alerts, and does reporting on performance, said Josh Fraser, VP of business development at RightScale, in making the announcement. RightScale, a cloud management supplier, is now offering Hyperic HQ, a Web application performance monitoring system, in its RightScale Cloud Management Platform. Hyperic HQ is one of the few third-party solutions for monitoring an application’s performance as it runs in the Amazon EC2 cloud or in Google’s App Engine cloud. Amazon added its own CloudWatch service in May.
It can monitor 75 commonly used software products in the cloud, including application servers, databases, messaging servers, authorization servers, and HTTP servers, such as the Apache Web Server. Hyperic was acquired as a company in early May by SpringSource, a supplier of lightweight technologies for building Java and Groovy on Grails applications. Hyperic HQ is now part of its application management tools offering. The company provides cloud templates for building workloads and shipping them off to target clouds for execution. The deployment and scaling of the application in the cloud can be managed through a RightScale management console.
I believe that cloud computing will revolutionize the way enterprises obtain business and IT services and change the kind of payback they get from their IT investments,” said Rich Marcello, president, Unisys Systems and Technology. “Our clients tell us that they see great value in moving enterprise applications and data to the cloud. However they have lacked the comprehensive security to make them confident in doing so.” Underpinning this strategy is Unisys Stealth security solution, a data protection technology initially designed for government applications and now available to commercial clients. The Unisys Stealth technology cloaks data through multiple levels of authentication and encryption, bit-splitting data into multiple packets so it moves invisibly across networks and protects data in the Unisys secure cloud.
Using Unisys services and technologies, organizations can create a private cloud within their data centers, a public cloud through secure Unisys-managed cloud solutions, or a hybrid cloud solution combining the best of both private and Unisys-managed cloud services. The Unisys cloud computing strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed, automated IT infrastructures to Unisys-managed cloud services. This allows clients to reap the economic benefits of cloud services more quickly.
- Cloud Transformation Services, a portfolio of advisory and implementation services that help clients assess potential cloud computing options and determine which option best suits their needs or financial objectives.
Unisys also is planning a Stealth solution for data security on storage area networks (SAN) by providing the same cloaking capability for “data at rest” in a virtualized storage environment. Integrated with the new Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, the Unisys Stealth technology enables encrypted “data in motion” to remain invisible as it traverses the infrastructure until it is reassembled upon delivery to authorized users. As client needs or data security requirements dictate, the Unisys Secure Cloud Solution can balance workloads across a global network of Unisys data centers, which are certified to key international standards such as ISO/IEC 27001:2005 for security, ISO/IEC 20000 for service management and the SAS 70 Type II auditing standard.
The new services include Secure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), for provisioning physical and virtual servers that both scale out and scale up; Secure Platform as a Service (PaaS), which provides a Java software stack, with .NET support planned, to make it easier for clients to move their applications to the cloud without making changes; My Secure Application as a Service (AaaS), for automatic provisioning of IT resources to support applications with multi-tier architectures; and Secure Software as a Service (SaaS), which provides access to hosted applications. Unisys plans a “cloud-in-a-box” solution as a comprehensive IT infrastructure package, enabling quick and cost-effective implementation of a private cloud. This solution will include virtualization capabilities, automation of ITIL best practices for service management, and Unisys Converged Remote Infrastructure Management capabilities, with Unisys Stealth solution as an option for extreme security.
