Most folks who use cloud storage take a simple approach -- choose a service and use it. Power users never do things the easy way. For their homes and businesses, quite often power users and IT pros (commonly the precisely same thing) use several services, especially when they are free (at least for a limited amount of storage). And sometimes, different services are for different uses.
This can all be confusing. Did I leave that file in Dropbox or SkyDrive? SMEStorage, a service from a company called SMEStorage (if you want to learn the meaning of eponymous, there it is), aggregates these disparate services, providing greater storage without running up the bill, a simpler view and easier file retrieval.
Reviewer Derek Schauland took it for a whirl and saw a role for the tool for businesses and consumers.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/24/2012 at 12:47 PM5 comments
You might think that RentTheCloud.com sounds like any other cloud vendor where you rent time on their machines to run your applications or their applications (you know, IaaS vs. SaaS).
But you would be wrong. This Web site, from A-Frame Technology Services, doesn't rent the cloud at all. Instead, it helps you find a proper cloud landlord. The company's service is based on the real estate broker model. They'll find you a cloud provider and if you're happy, you pay them a commission, typically one to two months of the rental fee.
A-Frame isn't just flying blind. The company says it has cloud experts who can give expert advice.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/17/2012 at 12:47 PM4 comments
Virtualization vendor Parallels now wants into the cloud, a natural progression as clouds are largely built on virtualized infrastructure. In fact, the company is already in the cloud and is helping Microsoft Office 365 partners set up and charge for cloud services.
Parallels is strengthening its Redmond ties with a new hire for CTO, Michael Toutonghi. Toutonghi has some serious Microsoft chops, having helped start the .NET effort and heading up the group that built the Windows 95 kernel.
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/13/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
Less than six months after shipping, Office 365 got its third update. The first two were modest; this one has some real meat.
Like the on-premise version of the Office productivity suite, Office 365 has tight links to SharePoint. The update gives it closer ties to the document repository and collaboration platform. These ties revolve essentially around the Web version of SharePoint, which makes sense for the Web-based Office 365.
Office 365 also now supports Lync for Mac, a unified communication tool, and Windows Phone 7.5.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's Internet storage service SkyDrive has been enhanced to be more app-specific, making it more logical to peruse and work with your files.
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/13/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
Oracle has bought its way into many a market -- Java, ERP, even server hardware. It also has a role to play in application servers. It got into this area by buying BEA a few years back, which bought WebLogic way back in 1998.
Now Oracle is on the 12th iteration of the WebLogic server, a version designed to build and migrate apps to the cloud. WebLogic Server 12c ("c" for "cloud") is designed to support private cloud apps or programs meant to run on Oracle's Exalogic cloud. WebLogic is meant for Java developers and supports Oracle's JRockit Java Virtual Machine.
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/13/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
Guess who invented virtualization and when? VMware in the late '90s? Citrix in the very late '80s? Try IBM, which in 1968 shipped the very first hypervisor, which ran on the IBM System/360 Model 67 mainframe. Some of those same engineers who worked on that hypervisor later helped build hypervisors for System p and other high-end IBM servers.
So what about mainframes, now dubbed the System z? It is not well-known, but the System z has long been able to virtualize AIX and Linux workloads. The biggest of the big iron can act as some 2,500 discrete servers.
Even lesser-known is the fact that IBM mainframes can also mimic and virtualize x86 machines and run x86 (i.e., Windows) workloads. This effort was announced earlier this year and is now reaching fruition. It may well be the ultimate green machine. Instead of a warehouse full of 2,000-plus servers, you have a much smaller room with much cheaper and simpler cooling and power doing the exact (well, not exactly exact) same thing.
Does a mainframe running Windows make sense, or it the worst combination of the old and the new? You tell me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/06/2011 at 12:47 PM3 comments
In most cases, IT looks at the cloud carefully, moves forward tentatively and -- if it likes what it sees -- adds more services as time moves along. Rare is the shop that slams the whole thing in reverse faster than a Hollywood stunt driver. But analytics vendor Mixpanel did just that, and blogged about its reasoning.
The company had high hopes for the cloud, buying into the promises of low cost and elasticity. However, theory and practice were two very different things. The company recently backed out of its Rackspace service, opting for a dedicated solution.
I recently wrapped up more than a month of research about how the WAN impacts cloud performance. Mixpanel had the same exact problem that I found: performance. More specifically, the variability and unpredictability of its application performance. Instead of blaming the WAN, Mixpanel thinks it has to do with the fact that the cloud datacenter is a shared environment. If another customer does something stupid, you also pay the price. The company also believes you can't duplicate in-house performance because cloud vendors buy lower-priced gear, not the best and fastest.
Today most important Mixpanel servers are dedicated, and the company couldn't be happier. "Since I started this migration, our traffic has grown more than ten-fold. At the same time, our infrastructure has gotten significantly faster, more reliable, and interestingly enough cheaper (at the per machine level). Most importantly, the amount of time I've spent fixing server issues late at night or on weekend has decreased to almost nothing," wrote a Mixpanel blogger.
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/06/2011 at 12:47 PM6 comments
The cloud can be a big, scary place. For as long as there have been IT departments, IT has had more or less full control of the infrastructure. With a datacenter, you can walk around all your gear, replace drives, reboot, update software and sometimes just stroll around happily seeing everything humming.
You can't see the cloud. You can't cruise around it (unless you're Superman). And your service provider is the one that gets to reboot the servers. In short, IT no longer has the control it is used to. According to a recent survey by cloud storage purveyor Nasuni, almost half of those questioned have serious reservations about losing control when moving to the cloud.
But a much bigger concern, the survey reveals, is security. Over 80 percent of IT pros are worried about the safety of their data and applications. These fears are holding back cloud apps, but also holding back cloud storage. A minority of IT personnel, 43 percent, will use the cloud for storage in the next year.
The onus is now on the vendors to show that apps and data in the cloud are not only safe, but still in the hands of IT. Only then will we see the full promise of the cloud realized.
Do you have any cloud fears? Cop to them at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/29/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
The battle for cloud partners continues with Microsoft winning the hand of Fujitsu, which is using Microsoft's Windows Azure to power its new Fujitsu Hybrid Cloud Services.
Fujitsu is doing far more than just loading Azure and SQL cloud services onto servers in its datacenter. It is making more of a services and consulting play, hoping to help IT build clouds that rest in the on-premise datacenter and span out to the external cloud. On the private side, Fujitsu is offering to help IT build and install internal Azure programs that run on Windows servers.
Some in IT see a hybrid cloud as the way to go long term. For others, the hybrid approach is a bridge as they eventually move all major operations off-site. "This will enable customers to have a good, solid model for integrating with their on-premises apps," said Fujitsu alliance director Jeff Stucker. "Even if they are going to move a majority of their workloads into the cloud over time, they need something that's going to tie it all together while they are in that process. It's a real nuts and bolts type of solution."
Fujitsu also says it can help migrate older apps, including those built for mainframes and minicomputers (like the AS/400) to the cloud, be it private, public or a bit of both.
Who is your cloud partner and how is it working out? You tell me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/29/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
How would you like to spend eight hours taxing the computing power of a cluster of 30,000 cores? Heck, with that, I could finally get my taxes done in time.
Some lucky researchers are going to get all that computing time -- a $10,000 value -- for free. This all comes courtesy of Cycle Computing, a supercomputing company. The CycleCloud BigScience Challenge (I guess the company isn't a fan of spaces between words!) is open to nonprofit researchers trying to do good. CycleCloud is a platform building cloud-based HPC apps.
Right now, there are five finalists. Here is a brief synopsis:
- Harvard is working on creating organic photovoltaic cells as a way to offer clean, green energy.
- Morgridge Institute for Research is trying to create stem cell treatments tailored for individuals and their ailments.
- The University of Notre Dame is learning more about how diabetes is formed.
- The TU Munich ROSTLAB is trying to decode every single possible gene sequence mutation.
- The Harvard Medical School is trying to understand the impact certain drugs have on Parkinson's disease.
What would you do with eight hours of massive processing time? Dream on at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/29/2011 at 12:47 PM1 comments
I'm sure nearly all major competitors would disagree, but Microsoft claims to be the one and only company to offer all three major styles of cloud computing: private, public and the blend called hybrid.
The claim was made at a recent investor event by Microsoft GM Charles Di Bona, who also took the opportunity to give Wall Street a crash course in cloud.
First, now that Ray Ozzie is gone from Microsoft, so is the term "Software Plus Services." A shorter and simpler term, "cloud," is its replacement. Second, Azure, perhaps the best-known of Redmond's cloud technologies, is really positioned as a Platform as a Service (PaaS). The idea is to have developers use .NET and other programming paradigms to build custom cloud apps. Finally, not content with just PaaS, Microsoft is now working to make Azure a real player in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
I'm not a huge fan of research commissioned and released by vendors, since it is clearly self-serving. But that doesn't mean it's wrong (nor is it necessarily right). Just call me a bit skeptical.
Earlier this month, cloud file storage provider Egnyte (I don't know what the name means either) released research done by Forrester Consulting arguing that on-premise file servers should and will be killed off. Actually, the "killed off" part seems to be Egnyte's conclusion, which seems to be a reach.
Here's what the study found: Fifty-seven percent of IT pros surveyed think their file servers cost far less to run than they actually do. When IT runs the real numbers, they are a magnitude larger than what they initially imagined. A second piece of the puzzle is the fact that a bit over 40 percent of "information workers" use online storage for work purposes, services that IT did not specify or approve and don't manage.
Based on this, file servers are too expensive and workers are already used to online storage, which Egnyte claims is far cheaper. Putting two and two together, file servers should and will die. The replacement is a hybrid cloud where cloud file storage is synced with an on-premise NAS, which won't be so much a traditional file server as it is a "virtual appliance."
I have no doubt that plenty will move in this direction, and some may even use Egnyte's online storage services. (Did I mention that Egnyte sells the technology that will supposedly kill off the file server?) But certainly not everyone will, especially as server prices continue to plummet. Do you believe vendor-backed research? And in particular, how much sense does this report make? You tell me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments