Latest News from Cloudonomics Journal

NaviSite CTO to Present at Cloud Expo East

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:45:00 EDT

NaviCloud is a next-generation platform that combines the economic efficiencies of cloud computing with true enterprise-class reliability and security. With built-in high-availability, a state of the art operations center, and a highly resilient service delivery infrastructure spanning multiple data centers, NaviCloud ensures business continuity. In his session at the 5th International Cloud Expo, Denis Martin, EVP and Chief Technology Officer, NaviSite Inc., will deep dive into the architecture and the real building blocks of NaviCloud, which also employs a multi-pronged approach to ensuring and enforcing the security, privacy, and integrity of enterprise applications and data.

Symbian Foundation Builds Cloud Platform on Red Hat

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EDT

Not to mix metaphors or anything but the Symbian Foundation, which is trying to foster a new open source community around the old Nokia-proprietary mobile phone operating system, is basing the private cloud platform that hosts its developer web site developer.symbian.org on Red Hat’s Linux. Red Hat also runs most of Symbian’s servers, which have been licensed through IBM Services.

VirtuDataCenter to Exhibit at Cloud Expo East

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that VirtuDataCenter, a cloud computing network infrastructure company, will offer a complete turnkey alternative to today’s cloud computing solutions. They will exhibit at SYS-CON's 5th International Cloud Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong. VirtuDataCenter offers a complete end-to-end virtual private cloud solution that provides total management control and impenetrable mission critical security. All aspects of the VirtuDataCenter solution work together to provide a total solution for cloud computing and virtualization in today’s network infrastructure

RightScale Upgrades

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 06:15:00 EDT

RightScale says it’s got new enterprise features in its cloud management platform. It’s talking better authorization and permissioning control, cost-tracking, and overall management of running virtual servers in the cloud across large organizations with multiple users, departments and projects They support the creation of IT self-service and corporate governance strategies in the cloud that are supposed to match internal IT policies. RightScale also announced that it’s now launched a million servers into the cloud.

Ingres to Be in Novell Appliance

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:45:00 EDT

Preternaturally quiet since a hedge fund offered to buy it two weeks ago and take it private, Novell stated on Wednesday that the open source Ingres database is available in the free SUSE Studio as part of the SUSE Appliance Program. Novell and Ingres are supposed to jointly support and market the SUSE Studio Appliance Template for Ingres Database to ISVs. The widgetry creates an on-ramp for developers to integrate their applications and get to market with a software appliance quickly. According to IDC, software appliance adoption is growing and has perhaps doubled in the last two years.

Microsoft’s Bill Zack to Present at Cloud Expo East

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:45:00 EDT

You are interested in cloud computing, but where do you start? How are vendors defining Cloud Computing? What do you need to know to figure out which applications make sense in the cloud? And is any of this real today? In his session at the 5th International Cloud Expo, Bill Zack, an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft, will explore a set of five patterns that you can use for moving to the cloud, together with working samples on Windows Azure, Google AppEngine, and Amazon EC2. He will provide the tools and knowledge to help you more clearly understand moving your organization to the cloud.

Monitoring: Via the Cloud or Open-Source Tools?

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:45:54 EDT

As today’s fast-paced IT industry changes, with the development and growth of virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing, both open-source network and cloud-based monitoring tools are attracting growing interest. But which to choose? Advocates of open-source technology praise the flexibility and reasonable costs of these tools, making them a viable alternative to software offered by large enterprise technology [...]

Zenith Infotech Shows Technology Solution Providers How to Side-Step Security Threats in Springfield, Massachusetts

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:41:52 EDT

Interactive technology showcase provides live demonstration of cloud computing solutions

Mårten Mickos Named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:31:35 EDT

Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creators of the leading open source private cloud software, announced today that Mårten Mickos has joined the company as chief executive officer. Mickos comes to Eucalyptus with a track record of building global disruptive businesses, most recently as CEO of MySQL AB, where he grew the company from a start-up to the second largest open source company in the world. Former Eucalyptus CEO Woody Rollins is now Eucalyptus Systems’ chief financial officer.

Zenith Infotech Shows Technology Solution Providers How to Side-Step Security Threats in San Diego

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:31:23 EDT

Interactive technology showcase provides live demonstration of cloud computing solutions

Zenith Infotech Shows Technology Solution Providers How to Side-Step Security Threats in Cincinnati

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:52:21 EDT

Interactive technology showcase provides live demonstration of cloud computing solutions

IceWEB to Launch IceWEB.TV

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:48:31 EDT

IceWEB, Inc.™ (OTCBB: IWEB), www.IceWEB.com, a leading provider of building blocks for cloud storage networks and purpose built appliances, announced today that the Company will be launching IceWEB.TV (www.iceweb.tv), an additional medium for communicating with shareholders and business partners. The new channel will deliver up-to-date information on new partners, technology advancements, product awards etc. In conjunction with the Launch, the Company will be making a major announcement in the coming week. The announcement will be made via a press release, an 8(k) filing for compliance with Regulation Fair Disclosure and a video broadcast by Mr. Signorello, exclusively on IceWEB.TV.

HE-5 Resources Corp.’s Triple Crown CRM’s Mustang-Look Makes It Happen “In the Clouds” as Opposed to Microsoft Outlook

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:41:32 EDT

HE-5 Resources (other OTC: HRRN.PK) is targeting for a slice of the global Personal Information Manager Software business, and is taking advantage of “cloud computing” as opposed to Microsoft Outlook. With the launch of Triple Crown CRM’s Mustang-Look which has cross-platform compatibility with all computer Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OS for example), and web browsers (Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox for example), and with secure, encrypted, world-wide web (W3) access to your information, you are “one internet connection away” (OICA).

NComputing Drives Desktop Virtualization Into the Mainstream With Launch of $20 Numo System-On-Chip Bringing Windows and Linux Applications to Any Device

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:00:05 EDT

NComputing Inc., the global leader in low-cost virtual desktops for Windows, Linux, VMware and Citrix, with over 20 million daily users, today announced the launch and immediate availability of its Numo family of chips. Numo is an ambidextrous chip that will power consumer applications, such as accessing Google from a smart TV, as well as enterprise applications, such as using Microsoft Windows-based virtual desktops in bank branch offices. NComputing's Numo provides maximum flexibility and choice as modern computing models continue their inevitable transformation and integration between traditional desktops and new models of cloud computing.

Stoneware Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo April 19-21 New York City

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:30:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Stoneware, a provider of private cloud technology, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 5th International Cloud Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Now is the conference of our discontent…

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:41:39 EDT

Talking about standards apparently brings out some very strong feelings in a whole lot of people.

From “it’s too early” to “we need standards now” to “meh, standards will evolve where they are necessary”, some of the discussions at CloudConnect this week were tinged with a bit of hostility toward, well, standards in general and the folks trying to define them. In some cases the hostility was directed toward the fact that we don’t have any standards yet.

[William Vambenepe has a post on the subject, having been one of the folks hostility was directed toward during one session ]

Lee Badger, Computer Scientist at NIST, during a panel on “The Standards Real Users Need Now” offered a stark reminder that standards take time. He pointed out the 32 months it took to define and agree on consensus regarding the ASCII standard and the more than ten years it took to complete POSIX. Then Lee reminded us that “cloud” is more like POSIX than ASCII. Do we have ten years? Ten years ago we couldn’t imagine that we’d be here with Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing, so should we expect that in ten years we’ll still be worried about cloud computing?

Probably not.

The problem isn’t that people don’t agree standards are a necessary thing, the problem appears to be agreeing on what needs to be standardized and when and, in some cases, who should have input into those standards. There are at least three different constituents interested in standards, and they are all interested in standards for different reasons which of course leads to different views on what should be standardized.

WHAT are we STANDARDIZING?

And while everyone talks about these nebulous “standards”, very few explain what those standards are. Are they APIs? Are they protocols on the order of IP and TCP? Are they data exchange formats? Or are they properly the standardization of policies and information into a portable metadata that can be used to exchange information such as SLA and infrastructure service requirements that can be packaged easily with the application for portability and that can be interpreted by infrastructure to provision and execute such services?

Most folks seem interested in “cloud” standards as a means to achieve portability across and interoperability between cloud computing implementations, both on and off-premise. But once the “edge” of the cloud is penetrated, the mechanisms become, well, cloudy and obscured and are often portrayed more as a “black box” than as the integral piece of the interoperability puzzle they are.

Applications are not islands; they rely on infrastructure to provide everything from IP addresses to packet and data filtering to scalability to performance enhancements and security. These infrastructure services must necessarily be a part of the "portability plan” that allows applications to migrate from one environment to another and still behave as expected. The concern is that standardization inside the cloud environment might (a) restrict innovation and (b) expose the “secret sauce” of individual providers, rendering their investments and innovations moot.

As explained by Krishna Sankar during a subsequent panel at CloudConnect on “Where are standards going?”, it is not so much that the interfaces, the APIs, become standardized as it is that the policy and configuration metadata be based on a standardized model. Doing so allows components from multiple vendors to implement specific services and support in innovative ways without compromising the ability of providers and organizations from migrating application dependent on those components. It is the model that is important and must be standardized, not necessarily the means by which that model is exchanged and transported. Ideally this metadata would correlate closely to what consumers of cloud computing are looking to standardize – namely the means by which capabilities and prices and services can be discovered and compared. James Urquhart’s pCard proposal heavily invests itself in a common, standardized metadata model that describes both capabilities and services in a way that makes it possible for consumers and ultimately applications themselves to query, compare, and choose from across cloud computing providers in a dynamic and autonomous way.

CLOUDS cannot be BLACK BOXES

It is tempting to view cloud computing implementations as black boxes, particularly when they are of the “public” ilk. But surveys, polls, and research continues to offer strong evidence that organizations are not solely interested in “public” cloud computing, but are also interested in “private” and hybrid cloud computing models. This means that standardization inside at the infrastructure service and component layers must be considered as important as the interfaces to the cloud computing environments themselves, lest implementers suffer the same problems as providers: lock-in and inability to change “providers”.

In the case of infrastructure, specifically the focus of much of Infrastructure 2.0, is the necessity of standardization not only to address concerns regarding vendor lock-in, but to make cloud computing work the way it was intended. Without standardization the cost of managing such volatile environments will certainly become as prohibitive as IPAM (IP Address Management) today, and thus the “benefits” of cloud computing would surely be lost to organizations as they struggled to integrate, automate, and orchestrate their environment into a dynamic infrastructure capable of automatically dealing with the rapid rate of change associated with dynamic and virtualized environments.

The “secret sauce” of the provider, and ultimately any business, are the processes they employ to perform business, whether technologically or on a product level. It is the processes that ultimately define a “cloud” and thus it is those operational processes that are the source of efficiency gains and a fluid architecture. Those processes cannot be automated without a common model for policy metadata that provides the base information necessary for infrastructure to configure itself, to take action, to interpret SLAs and work toward meeting them.

We don’t need more APIs. We need a model. That’s what we should be standardizing. And not just at the cloud interface layer, but inside at the infrastructure service layer.

Related blogs & articles:

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,infrastructure 2.0,integration,collaboration,standards,cloud connect,pCard,Urquhart,Sankar

Upcoming Event: Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint 2010, Unified Communications, Social Media Strategy – May 13, 2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:04:34 EDT

Success Accelerators announces “Your Business … Accelerated,” part of their 4 City Tour, is scheduled for the Westin Peachtree Plaza in downtown Atlanta, GA on May 13, 2010.

Upcoming Event: Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint 2010, Unified Communications, Social Media Strategy – May 11, 2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:58:27 EDT

Success Accelerators announces “Your Business … Accelerated,” part of their 4 City Tour, is scheduled for the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, NC on May 11, 2010.

Upcoming Event: Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint 2010, Unified Communications, Social Media Strategy – May 6, 2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:56:28 EDT

Success Accelerators announces “Your Business … Accelerated,” part of their 4 City Tour, is scheduled to visit The Westin in Tyson’s Corner, VA on May 6, 2010.

Upcoming Event: Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint 2010, Unified Communications, Social Media Strategy – May 4, 2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:50:31 EDT

Success Accelerators announces “Your Business … Accelerated,” part of their 4 City Tour, is scheduled to visit the Duke Mansion in Charlotte, NC on May 4, 2010.

National Safe Place Partners With Block5 for Groundbreaking QR Coding

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:31:20 EDT

New technology allows teens to find help fast with the help of smart phones

Xiotech Introduces Intelligent Application Storage

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:12:01 EDT

Addressing the business challenges and infrastructure burdens created by trends including massive data growth, virtualization, cloud computing and green data centers, Xiotech Corporation unveiled its vision and roadmap to deliver the market's first and only solution for Intelligent Application Storage.

Riskonnect, Inc. Taps David Wood for Regional Account Executive for the Southeast and North Central Regions

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:59:24 EDT

Independent risk management software company Riskonnect, Inc. continues on a rapid pace of hiring world-class talent with the announcement today of David Wood as the newest addition to world-class sales team. Wood joins the company as a Regional Sales Executive for the Southeast and North Central regions.

Cloud Expo Sponsor Rackspace Launches Media Services Solution

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:30:00 EDT

Cloud Expo sponsor Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry, today announced from SXSW 2010 the launch of Rackspace Media Services. This Enterprise-level solution will provide an open source, direct-to-consumer (D2C) web infrastructure for music recording labels and other media segments that need to accelerate content delivery online, scale rapidly to respond to fan demand, and create new revenue streams. Artists' websites are becoming increasingly complex with eCommerce, user generated content, social media and custom applications, forcing record labels to act as IT “experts” and distracting them from their core business. As a result, many artists are turning to third-party digital solution providers for online music distribution, merchandise sales and concert ticket promotion - cutting record labels off from significant revenue and branding opportunities.

Global Outsourcing Contract Volume Set to Climb in 2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:57:10 EDT

Cloud computing, multi-sourcing, focus on governance driving awards up, values down, according to TPI Momentum Market Trends & Insights 4Q09 Annual Report

NI Technology Updates Outlooks for Intel, Netlist, Citrix Systems, EMC and VMware

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:35:17 EDT

Orange Business Services Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in Three Magic Quadrant Reports

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:00:32 EDT

Orange Business Services has been placed in the Leaders quadrant in Gartner Inc.’s three latest reports. Based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute, Gartner named Orange Business Services in the Leaders quadrant for Global Network Service Providers¹, Pan-European Network Service Providers²and Communications Outsourcing and Professional Services, Worldwide³.

Criteo Selects Telx as Its Colocation and Interconnection Partner for the East Coast

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:09:28 EDT

InformationWeek Analytics Launches Subscription Model to Give Business Technology Professionals Complete Access to Critical Research Analysis for Strategic Decision Making

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:09:14 EDT

Charter Subscription Membership Ushers in Next Level Access to Premium Content

Everything Channel's XChange Solution Provider Conference Brought Solution Providers Together with Channel Vendors to Meet, Build Relationships and Strategize for Growth

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:01:54 EDT

GuestTek International, Inc.'s Subsidiary Targets Increasing Its Market Share In The Multi-Billion Dollar Software Security Market

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:45:13 EDT

There's Privacy Then There's Privacy

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:35:00 EDT

There are two kinds of privacy. Only one is the responsibility of vendors and providers to ensure. The rest is up to you.

Regulations like HIPAA and PCI-DSS are designed to guarantee that providers storing electronic personally identifiable information, or PII in the vernacular, is safeguarded against theft or accidental disclosure. They are not designed to provide consumers with any kind of “social gag” that might alert them they are offering up information or photographs the likes of which they may later regret sharing. While social networking sites like Facebook now provide “privacy” options that allow consumers to control who can see photos and read information posted, it does not force (though it does prompt and encourage occasionally) the use of such controls. That is completely up to the consumer.

Rielle Hunter is extremely upset with the three photographs of herself featured in the latest issue of GQ magazine. The woman who was involved in a months-long affair with Democrat John Edwards told ABC's Barbara Walters Monday she found the images - two of which feature her without pants - "repulsive" and, Hunter also told Walters, she cried for two hours because she felt they were so terrible. […] When I asked, 'Well if that was the case, why did you pose the way you did?' She said that she trusted Mark Seliger, who she said is a brilliant photographer, and she quote 'went with the flow,'" Walters said on ABC's The View. -- Hunter upset over GQ photos

Like Hunter, some people become upset when photos or information they intentionally shared with others through a variety of digital media options become “more” public than perhaps they’d like. Hunter claimed she “trusted” the photographer. Trusted him to what? Not publish photos he was paid to take? Like Hunter, some consumers may claim they “trusted” site X and just “went with the flow.” But again, trusted them to what? Not publish content intentionally provided for that purpose?

Controls such as those offered by Facebook or additional privacy-focused features will not help consumers hell bent on sharing every embarrassing detail of their lives with the public. And it certainly shouldn’t be blamed for the subsequent “exposure” when a consumer decides a particular piece of information or photo has turned out to be a not so good thing to share.

COULD INFRASTRUCTURE 2.0 PROVIDE an OPTION?

Data Leak Prevention (DLP) solutions such as those provided by Web Application Firewalls (WAF) seek to prevent the accidental or intentional exposure of confidential data. That’s the aforementioned PII: account numbers, credit card data, social security numbers – basically information that could enable a thief to more easily steal one’s identity. It does not prevent, shall we say, language or other information you wouldn’t want your mother (or grandmother) hearing/seeing/knowing about. But could it? Possibly.

Infrastructure “scrubbing” services similar to those used to implement HIPAA and PCI (DLP solutions) could provide additional services to consumers to “scrub” content for specific keywords. Perhaps it could be the case that sites like Facebook could provide a service, enabled via an Infrastructure 2.0 capable solution, to partake in a workflow that would look for a consumer-provided list of keywords that forced an additional “sanity check” on the consumer when posting.

This is very much a “reverse” content-filtering style application of a proxy, often used to prevent unsuitable content of the NSFW variety from entering the network. But these content-filtering systems are generally designed to prevent requested content from being delivered.

In this case, we are potentially preventing unsuitable content – as specified by the consumer – from being POSTed in the first place, which is a bit of a twist on the traditional content-filtering scheme for two reasons:

1. It’s happening on the request rather than on the response.

2. It’s working from a set of user-defined “unsuitable” trigger-words rather than the provider or organization’s list, which may be very different.

It’s very similar to traditional content-filtering systems in that it’s being implemented as a network infrastructure component rather than in the application itself.

The reason such a solution would require an Infrastructure 2.0 capable solution is that the consumer would need to somehow “program” the infrastructure component to recognize their list of “naughty (or trigger)” words, which requires integration and control-plane capabilities that non-infrastructure 2.0 capable components lack. Imagine that as a consumer set up their “policy” within the application the application actually communicated that back to the infrastructure via Infrastructure 2.0 control plane mechanisms. Or perhaps the application sets a cookie that can be examined by the infrastructure and used to trigger the appropriate action – submit to the application or return with a “Are you sure you want to do this? Y/N” option. This allows providers the means to offer “value add” services that might generate revenue while not bogging down the entire infrastructure by always enabling the functionality for every customer.

Regardless of actual implementation this offloads the “searching” of the content to an external device and prevents additional use of network, network infrastructure, and application infrastructure components within the architecture. It’s more efficient to stop requests – whether malicious or unsuitable by anyone’s definition – at the point furthest from the application as it prevents the unnecessary consumption of resources.

Of course the best place to stop the needless consumption of resources due to the posting of unsuitable content is at the keyboard, but it’s understandable that as we (people) continue to integrate digital media into the ebb and flow of our daily lives we just might occasionally need a reminder that what we’re about to share may be something we’d regret the next morning. And the next morning…and the next morning…and the next.

Because while the “do you remember what you said/did last night” coming from friends will eventually fade into memory, it takes a lot longer when there’s three million “friends” that want to say it.

Related blogs & articles:

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,infrastructure 2.0,cloud computing,privacy,web application security,security,web 2.0

Tier1 Research Hosts Second Annual Datacenter Transformation Summit – Northern Virginia

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:31:12 EDT

Tier1 Research, the independent IT analyst firm that is the preeminent source for analysis on the hosting and colocation market, kicks off its 2010 events calendar with the second annual Datacenter Transformation Summit – Northern Virginia (DTS-NV) at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, on June 2. The summit will explore the stability of the datacenter market segment, the competencies and capabilities of third-party partners, the road ahead for datacenter construction and architecture, as well as an additional array of topics geared toward the evolution of the industry.

Chickens, Cows, Money and the Cloud

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Here’s an interesting analogy on cloud computing for you! In the Christian Science Monitor’s Reformed Broker blog, the writer reports on the recent RSA Conference on computer security held earlier this month in San Francisco, and he quotes an observation from an attendee that appeared originally in The Economist. At the meeting, Art Coviello, president of EMC’s security division, likened the cloud to the virtualization of money. Once upon a time, people carried chickens under their arms and led cows around to market in order to barter for the goods they needed – maybe a nice bed (stuffed with some luxurious fresh straw). Then, along came money, first coins, and then paper. And people could carry their wealth more easily – maybe even higher someone to tote that bed home for them.

ForceLogix Acquires XenoWize

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:00:05 EDT

ForceLogix Technologies Inc. (TSX-V: FLT), the leader in Sales Performance Management (SPM), today announced that it has closed its acquisition of XenoWize, a leading provider of cloud computing software solutions development.

CA’s Latest Cloud Acquisition Focuses on Monitoring

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EDT

OK; I’m not skipping or anything, but I am happy. CA Inc., obviously on the path to acquire more and more cloud technology providers in order to build up its own capabilities for cloud computing, is joining the ever-louder chorus of those in our industry recognizing that enterprises want, no, they demand, better monitoring of cloud providers. CA this week announced it has agreed to buy a company called Nimsoft, Inc., a Redwood City, CA-based provider of IT performance and availability monitoring solutions for small and mid-sized companies and managed service providers (MSPs). It’s supposedly all for cash, a transaction valued at $350 million.

Integrien Continues to Advance Company Strategy with IT Industry Luminaries

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:00:51 EDT

Integrien Corporation, the leader in real-time performance analytics, today announced that it has expanded its Technology Advisory Board. Including members who have run some of the largest IT infrastructures in the world, as well as leading IT software industry executives, the Technology Advisory Board helps Integrien evolve both product and company strategy to support growth initiatives.

Will Social Networks Lead to a Community Cloud?

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:00:00 EDT

On Thursday 25th March 2010, people from an estimated 200 cities across the globe will come together to celebrate and support the second Global Twestival. Defined by Twitter as ‘a way to take part in a global event that transforms lives’, Twestival was created last year by London based Amanda Rose, an events-minded entrepreneur, who believed that Twitter’s users could be brought together for the common good. Ms Rose’s creation resulted in a series of worldwide off line events – from concerts to knitting groups – that raised over $250,000 for the chosen beneficiary - Global Twestival - and brought worldwide public awareness to the global water crisis and the devastating fact that over 1 billion people lack access to clean water.

AP: You Are Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:00:00 EDT

I was working on an article about making the distinction between Enterprise and Consumer Cloud Computing, in which I offered the viewpoint that the current issues involving the Enterprise Cloud are matters of implementation, while the main issue with Consumer Cloud is one of ideology. Enterprise Cloud discussions are about public v private v hyrid, virtualization v real cloud, and what metrics are used to justify or reject a Cloud Computing initiative or strategy. But the main Consumer Cloud discussion is whether we should do it all. Shall we turn over all of our personal information to a big corporation, which is very likely to cave into governmental "requests" to see that information?

What Does a Two-Year Old and Cloud Computing Apps Have in Common?

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:00:00 EDT

What does a 2-year old and cloud-based applications have in common?

The Toddler has recently decided that he can navigate the stairs by himself. Insists on it, in fact. That’s a bit nerve-wracking, especially when he decides that 2:30am is a good time to get up, have a snack, and recreate a Transformers battle in the family room.

It’s worse when you’re asleep and don’t know about it.

Oh eventually you hear him and you get up and try to convince him it’s time for sleep (see? all the grown ups are doing it) but it takes a while before he finally agrees and you can climb back into bed yourself.

Mobility. It’s a double-edged sword that can bite not only parents of Toddlers testing out their newly discovered independence but the operators and administrators trying to deal with applications that, thanks to virtualization, have also discovered they have wings – and they want to use them.

IT’S 2:30AM, DO YOU KNOW WHERE ALL YOUR APPLICATION INSTANCES ARE?

When ~~Toddlers~~ application instances auto-launch themselves at 2:30am in any cloud computing environment it’s important to know where they are. While the worst the Toddler will likely do is try to raid the refrigerator the application may be doing far worse – it may be running up charges for merely existing while not doing anything substantially beneficial for you, like responding to application requests. In that respect you could say a virtualized application is more like The Teenager than The Toddler, because it seems to absorb money without any kind of return on investment.

Applications have never been islands but their reliance on the rest of the infrastructure to provide value, to respond to requests, to execute their functions, has never been more evident than when they’re dumped virtually into a cloud computing style environment. Without integration – either from within the application or from within its controlling management systems – with the rest of the infrastructure the application really is just wracking up charges without providing any real value to you or the users for whom it was launched.

And when applications become mobile, popping up at odd hours of the day and night in response to events and demands, this integration is absolutely required to ensure that the very raison d’etre of the application instance isn’t lost in the ~~kitchen~~ myriad virtual images humming happily in the data center (wherever that may be).

ORCHESTRATION REQUIRED

This is why orchestration is so important in ensuring a smoothly running virtualized infrastructure. Without someone paying attention, governing the instances, and making sure they are integrated with the right infrastructure components at the right time the entire value proposition of cloud computing and “fluid” architectures is rendered null and void. In the enterprise data center this process can be simpler than you might think, as the application can be directly integrated with the upstream components necessary to ensure it’s included in the process of increasing capacity through elastic scalability. When you “own” the infrastructure and you have the ability to integrate through standards-based mechanisms, you can ensure that no application is ever left behind when it enters the fray.

When you don’t own the infrastructure you need to be more choosy about the environment, ensuring that there are processes in place and means by which application instances will not be “lost” and incurring charges without providing benefit. What you don’t want is a manual process that requires you to manually integrate the application into the provider’s high-availability infrastructure (or yours in a true IaaS environment). You need Infrastructure 2.0 enabled components and operational processes that allow you to automatically ensure application instances are always being utilized when they’re available and not “powered on” when they aren’t.

Efficiency is about orchestrating operational processes, about eliminating manual tasks that could – and should – be handled through operational integration within the broader cloud computing ecosystem.

If that’s not the case, then the mobility of applications really is nothing less than a giant pain in aaS.

Related blogs & articles:

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,cloud computing,infrastructure 2.0,mobility,XaaS,integration,collaboration,virtualization,orchestration

Objectivity Named “Bronze Sponsor” of World's Largest Cloud Event

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:45:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Objectivity, a leading provider of scalable database management solutions for mission-critical, real-time and distributed applications, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 5th International Cloud Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. The company's patented technology and flagship product, Objectivity/DB, is unique in its support for distributed architectures, cloud-based applications, and complex data management requirements. Objectivity/DB is ideal for applications requiring high-speed data ingest, data fusion and correlation, massively parallel processing, relationship analytics and graph traversal, and, of course, the ability to scale to meet the most demanding data storage requirements - all while using low-cost commodity computing resources such as those provided on Amazon's EC2, GoGrid's Cloud Hosting platform, and other distributed, virtualized cloud environments.

SAP to Resurrect Business ByDesign This Summer

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:30:00 EDT

Taking their new act on the road, SAP’s new co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe – in their second public appearance since getting the job last month – told a press conference in Silicon Valley Monday that the company’s problem-beset, taken-off-the-market SaaS product Business ByDesign will be relaunched in July following a forced redesign. Its developers, now apparently invested with more personal authority, started using agile software techniques that cut the team by a third – and with fewer cooks stirring the pot – code quality has reportedly improved. It’s still taking longer to get to market than SAP planned. It’ll be a 2.5 version that wends its way to market. SAP means to update it every five weeks once it appears.

Appistry Moves into BIG Storage

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:15:00 EDT

There and you thought that Appistry was just serving applications up into the cloud for U.S. intelligence agencies, FedEx and State Street Bank. Well, it is but now it’s gone and diversified into cloud storage – huge, massively scalable, petabyte-heavy, Hadoop-sized cloud storage for what’s generally called BIG data these days – storage with no single point of failure or bottlenecks, it says, created through the miracle of commodity servers, networking and Appistry’s newfangled REST-based distributed virtual file storage system. The start-up is taking on traditional storage, folks like EMC and NetApp, and conventions like SANs and NAS, where the thin little traffic lanes create a performance bottleneck for applications that have to process lots of data.

Novell’s Tom Cecere to Present at Cloud Expo East

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:00:00 EDT

Enterprises are seeing the value in Cloud Services – both the reduction in capital expenditures and the increasing maturity of the services offered. Unfortunately, they can't backtrack on their security and compliance requirements even if it results in money savings and capability improvements. In his session at the 5th International Cloud Expo, Tom Cecere, Product Strategy executive for Novell Cloud Security Services, will review the basic security and compliance information that enterprises should look for from their Cloud Computing providers. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Impetus Technologies Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:22:00 EDT

Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Impetus offers outsourced product development services, partnering with ISVs and high technology businesses to create award-winning, next-generation software products. Impetus stays at the bleeding edge of technology, and through its products, labs and research focus, ensures smooth development of high transactional, readily scalable and better performing software. A recognized leader in outsourced Software product development, the company has contributed to hundreds of successful products during its two decade long association with best-of-breed software and technology companies.

Ping Identity Shares Best Practices for Protecting Internet Identities at SecureWorld Expo Boston

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:35:31 EDT

Ping Identity^®, the leader in Internet Identity Security, will share best practices for safely managing Identities in the Cloud at SecureWorld Expo Boston, March 23-24, 2010. Ping Identity security and federated identity management experts will be on hand with product demos and insights into how new technologies and third-party services are meeting critical requirements around Single Sign-On in the Cloud.

North Bridge and 24 Open Source Leaders Announce 2010 ‘Future of Open Source’ Annual Survey Results at Computerworld’s OSBC

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:00:27 EDT

Today at Computerworld’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), a panel of top experts in the commercial open source industry, including executives from Acquia, Black Duck, North Bridge Venture Partners, Red Hat, and SugarCRM, announced the results of the North Bridge Venture Partners' annual ‘Future of Open Source’ survey. The survey results, collected from over 550 respondents including both vendors and non-vendors, highlight a range of significant issues continuing to impact the open source software landscape. Economic conditions, key market drivers and forecast for the coming year are among the topics taking center stage. The session will also gather real-time feedback from attendees via live text votes throughout the panel.

McAfee Launches Program for Added Security in the Cloud

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EDT

McAfee has announced the McAfee Cloud Secure program, a program for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to add additional security to their cloud deployments. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a pioneer in cloud computing and SuccessFactors, a SaaS provider, are expected be among the first providers to leverage the new program, which combines cloud security certification services, provided by leading certification and attestation providers, with automated auditing, remediation and reporting capabilities provided by McAfee. According to IDC, 87.5 percent of users surveyed cited “security concerns” as the primary issue for adopting Cloud-based services.1 By adding certification and automation, McAfee is providing an easy and efficient way for SaaS customers to gain added confidence in their cloud deployments.

Expand Networks setzt Virtualisierungsinitiative mit ExpandView Virtual fort

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:28:20 EDT

Expand Networks (www.expand.com), der führende Anbieter von WAN-Optimierungslösungen für die Konsolidierung und Virtualisierung von Niederlassungen, hat mit der Einführung von ExpandView Virtual im Rahmen der Strategie virtualisierter Produkte einen weiteren wichtigen Schritt nach vorn unternommen. ExpandView ist ein zentrales Managementsystem mit vollem Funktionsumfang, das die Herausforderungen umfangreicher Implementierungen und Konfigurationen sowie proaktiver Berichts- und Meldungsfunktionen mit allen physischen und virtuellen Geräten der Produktreihe Accelerator in physischen oder virtuellen Umgebungen bewältigt. ExpandView bietet „anwendungszentrierte Netzwerktransparenz“ zur Optimierung der Anwendungsleistung und der Bandbreitennutzung, sowie „Trendanalyseberichte“, um vor möglichen Kapazitätsengpässen proaktiv zu warnen und bei deren Eintreten gegenzusteuern.

Fujitsu Rewrites Cloud Computing Price-Performance Rules

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:15:00 EDT

Fujitsu on Wednesday introduced in North America the PRIMERGY Cloud eXtension server. The PRIMERGY CX1000 server provides scale-out capability, ideal for cloud computing environments, and sets new standards in data center economics by optimizing the operating cost drivers of power, heat and space. The PRIMERGY CX1000 server is designed from the ground up to deliver as much computing power as possible per square foot, at the lowest-possible price, packing 38 server nodes into a single rack to provide a minimum savings of 20 percent in power and cooling in comparison to a standard rack server assembly.