The same group that drove the creation of the wildly successful Amazon EC2 is now running Nimbula, a company that develops what it calls a cloud operating system. It newest software, Nimbula Director, is now in beta, and is really an extension of Nimbula's cloud OS.
The aim is to give the cloud the same discipline and manageability one has with a well-run on-premises data center.
In fact, Director promises to manage external clouds as well as in house private clouds, and let the two interoperate -- the holy grail of cloud computing that everyone is seemingly seeking.
According to the company, "Nimbula Director provides powerful utility-grade cloud features like policy-based authorization, enabling secure multi-tenancy, topology-independent distributed network security and monitoring and metering. Nimbula Director also uniquely provides highly automated deployment and cloud management to scale and facilitates easy migration of existing applications into the cloud by supporting multi-platform environments and flexible networking and storage."
There's so many companies, big and small, playing in this space that it is anyone's ball game. I wouldn't be surprised to see Amazon, IBM, HP, Microsoft, RackSpace or Google snap up Nimbula. Remember, you heard it hear first!
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/13/2011 at 12:47 PM1 comments
When I started looking into virtualization (mainly by having lunch with the founders of virtualization startups) I noticed two distinct accents: many entrepreneurs were Russian and Israeli. And with so many Russian émigrés to Israel, some company boasted both accents!
I'm just starting to see the same trend in the cloud. Take OpTier. This performance management concern has a management team trained in Israel, and while it is headquartered in New York, R&D remains in the Middle East.
Recently OpTier brought its performance management technology to the cloud. CloudFirst, now in beta, lets businesses track businesses transactions even when they are taking place in a service provider's cloud.
The tool also lets you test how well your apps will perform in the cloud, before taking the time, trouble and expense of migrating (I'd hate to migrate an app and then it have it unusable).
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/16/2010 at 12:47 PM5 comments
When it comes to IT surveys, I'm not sure who to trust. Most find research houses like Gartner more credible than vendors, but research houses have their own clients, biases and axes to grind.
So I tend to treat vendor research as at least as good (or bad) as analyst firms. That's why I'm bringing you the results of a survey from SolarWinds, a longtime maker of management software.
The survey shows that folks like you, IT professionals, are the ones doing the due diligence that will determine when and how your companies will move to the cloud. Over 60 percent of respondents say their companies are either looking at the cloud or already have one foot in the door. Potential benefits include saving money, becoming more efficient or increasing flexibility.
Because the cloud is such a departure, and the issues so complex, many are comfortable taking their time.
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/16/2010 at 12:47 PM6 comments
Many in IT want the cloud to function just like internal systems but with less of the hassles. In the early days, the cloud was a bit of a black box -- it only did what the providers let you.
That just doesn't cut it for IT pros used to total control. That is the whole impetus behind private clouds, whether they are hosted in the cloud or act as a private cloud in the data center.
Amazon, a cloud leader, is testing a new DNS service, RT 53, which offers IT some of this control, says Werner Vogels, CTO for Amazon . "Route 53 provides authoritative DNS functionality implemented using a worldwide network of highly available DNS servers," Voglels wrote in a recent blog. "Route 53 has the business properties that you have come to expect from an AWS service: fully self-service and programmable, with transparent pay-as-you-go pricing and no minimum usage commitments."
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/07/2010 at 12:47 PM7 comments
Don't you hate people who don't practice what they preach? Well then, steer your anger towards me, for I am a hypocrite. I not only preach about the cloud, I wrote a huge feature about data and file synchronization. I exposed the best tools and advocated that we all have an active role in the replica of our files, not just for backup, but for access from any device anywhere. Pretty good idea and pretty good advice.
So what did this nincompoop do? It all started yesterday evening when my son was taking Tae Kwon Do and I was finishing and article on deadline. I fired up my Dell Latitude and was hit with security alerts and what looked like a virus scan which launched and ran on its own.
This wasn't my virus scanner. I knew I was in trouble. Task Manager couldn't shut it down -- in fact I've never seen so many unrecognizable tasks running at one time. Microsoft Security Essentials was hosed as well.
So now I am using my daughter's old college HP laptop (with a missing 'i' key). That feature will have to wait -- I didn't have a backup. Doh! My Maxtor external drive has plenty of space, but the backup is hopelessly out of date. That's because I use Carbonite to back up files. The problem is I have a new machine and was too lazy to reactivate Carbonite.
I guess admitting my flaws, even something as simple as activating a cloud backup system which takes about two minutes, is a lesson for many of us. Cloud storage and backups are great, but they don't run themselves. They need to be set up right and monitored.
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/07/2010 at 12:47 PM7 comments
Content delivery is a pretty cool area. Akamai, which was founded by three MIT profs with the help of a handful of equally brilliant students, was a pioneer in the field.
Now Amazon wants to harness its massive network to help high-volume Web sites deliver content faster. The new service, CloudFront, is an add-on to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and moves bandwidth-intensive items such as video closer the ultimate consumer.
Right now there are only three edges supported, but as more customers come on board, I'm sure more cache location will be established.
Here's a side note on Akamai: Daniel L. Lewin (not to be confused with Dan'l Lewin -- a former Apple exec now with Microsoft), helped found the Internet content caching and distribution company, where he served as CTO. Shortly before 9/11, Akamai went public and all three founders became worth more than a billion dollars a piece. Lewin did't sail off into the sunset, but instead buckled down to move Akamai ahead. So it was he who found himself on a business trip, sitting on American Airlines Flight 11 from Logan Airport in Boston to LAX. His plane was taken over by scum and flown into one of the Twin Towers. Evidence indicates that Lewin, a highly trained former Israeli security official, was killed trying to stop the hijackers.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/30/2010 at 12:47 PM0 comments
I love startups. Someone has to come up with a hopefully great idea and have the gut to see it through. A few weeks ago I gave a quick glimpse of Nasuni. So did Bruce Hoard, editor-in-chief of Virtualization Review, which you can read here.The CEO, Andres Rodriguez, is seemingly connected to everyone that matters in the virtualization and cloud space.
Andres realizes storage is an expense, complex and hard to manage. And to do it right, you need multiple layers of backup, like with what EMC calls Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).
Each tier needs to be built and maintained. Big shops start with a SAN and then add tiers to backup the SAN -- which may include an entirely new SAN.
Nasuni wants to take over some of these tiers with its cloud storage platform -- they'll do this dirty work for you, freeing you to spend time on more forward-thinking strategic projects.
While still a young concern, Nasuni is on the second rev of its Nasuni Filer. It first takes a while to get your arms around the concept but then it all comes clear. Basically, the filer is a NAS that, instead of storing your gigabytes and terabytes on on-premise arrays, intelligently shuffles the data off to the cloud where the storage is virtually endless.
The Filer is hypervisor-friendly, and can handle the storage for your VMware or Hyper-V VMs. It can also move that Hyper-V data over to Azure.
Companies like Nasuni are the true heroes -- startups have created nearly every new technology category, from browsers to virtualization to the cloud.
What is your favorite startup of all time? Cast your vote at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/30/2010 at 12:47 PM2 comments
One of the advantages of working in Framingham, Mass. is that nearly all vendors pass through at one time or another. Framingham, oddly enough, is the epicenter of the computer press -- there must be a dozen tech magazines here and many more nearby.
That's how I got to meet Frank Huerta over a bowl of Lobster Bisque at Legal Seafoods.
Huerta is co-founder and CEO of cloud infrastructure startup Translattice. While many startups pick out a niche they hope to one day own, Huerta hopes to become the next VMware, by creating a foundation that changes the way we all computer.
Translattice, at least how we interpret it, implies that there is a lattice or grid, and that data moves across the grid freely.
The upcoming Translattice tool is an application provisioning platform that distributes processing and storage across the cloud and on-premises. Processing can be based in policies, location, level of use or priority. The distributed apps also have built-in redundancy so uptime and data are both protected.
Huerta certainly has the chops to pull this all off. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in physics and then gained an MBA from Stanford. His last startup, network intrusion protection company Recourse Technologies, sold to Symantec for a cool $135 mil in cash. Cha-ching.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/30/2010 at 12:47 PM5 comments
Dell is moving deeper into the cloud with its plans to buy Boomi. While Dell deals primarily in hardware that runs off-the-shelf third-party apps, Boomi is a cloud integration firm that eases the tying together of cloud apps with on-premises hardware and software.
Boomi already has one great reference account: Saleforce.com uses its integration software!
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/16/2010 at 12:47 PM1 comments
VMware is clearly aiming for the cloud with vSphere, but that is not the allusion I intended in my headline. By cloudy I mean VMware's future is uncertain.
VMware, as I see it and reported recently, has two main problems: Microsoft and itself.
Microsoft, although late in the virtualization market, is taking direct aim at VMware. Redmond now has Hyper-V, which is getting better each day and is free, as well as a line of desktop and application virtualization tools. Microsoft also has a rather amazing partner in the form of Citrix. That's the technical challenge.
The bigger challenge is one of corporate philosophy. Now let me state for the record that I admire VMware greatly. They are a pleasure to work with, and their typical employee has double my measly brainpower. The only reason I am justified in offering advice is I talk to customers and virtualization third parties. And from these convos I see VMware making many of the same mistakes that doomed Netscape.
Netscape was simply not friendly to third parties. I've lunched with probably two dozen virtualization CEOs and at least 23 have told me Microsoft is far easier to work with. Now that may well change in the future, but it is today's reality.
The other issue is that VMware is building an elaborate and impressive cloud ecosystem around its core hypervisor. That may make technical sense, but IT fears this level of lock-in. VMware simply must be open to other virtualization technologies.
VMware has a massive lead, but it is shrinking fast. I want this company to make the right moves so we are talking about them 10 years from now, not wondering where they went.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/16/2010 at 12:47 PM2 comments
Microsoft has a new report that discovers facts so obvious even Jessica Simpson could have found them.
The profound realization is this: If you move your IT operations to the cloud, you save electricity. And if you save electricity, you'll emit fewer greenhouse gasses.
Let's see here... If I stop running so many machines in my data center, I won't need as much juice? You don't need Encyclopedia Brown to figure that one out!
Despite the laughably obvious nature of the findings, the point is well taken for large shops that are running out of data center space and having their budgets busted by cooling costs.
A cloud-hosting company, through sheer economies of scale, should be far more efficient. And they can place their data centers where it makes most sense, such as in cool caves, cold climates (using outside air instead of AC) or near hydroelectric power stations.
The move to the cloud is inevitable, though perhaps not in a full-scale fashion. And as we make this move, we may well save some dough and keep Earth a bit cool in the process.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/16/2010 at 12:47 PM7 comments
A year ago Cisco, VMware and EMC all joined to form the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition. In point of fact, this is really a duo as EMC owns VMware.
Recently telecom service provider Orange Business Services has joined, and the group renamed itself the Flexible 4 Business Alliance.
The idea is to help IT move on-premises apps to private areas of the cloud. Of course this all requires a virtual foundation (VMware), storage (EMC), unified communications (Cisco) and WAN services and consulting (Orange).
Orange is a division of France Telecom, and says it has a footprint that stomps through some 200 countries. This is an interesting claim, since some geographers count fewer than 200 countries worldwide.
Are you getting pressured from business leaders in your shop or vendors to adopt cloud services? If so, how? Answers readily received at [email protected] or post in the comments.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/09/2010 at 12:47 PM3 comments