HP, like Microsoft, is apparently "all in the cloud." The company recently announced a slew of cloud services -- everything from private, to off-premise, to a mix of both. HP is also getting into the hosting, apparently for the first time.
The new HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute (ECS) is aimed at hardcore apps that will run in HP data centers in specially portioned private clouds. Company officials warn that developers and non-mission-critical apps need not apply.
HP expects most of these apps to be programs that are already virtualized.
The other tool is CloudSystem, an appliance that should be all you need to build a cloud for your own data center, such as networking, storage and servers.
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/08/2011 at 12:47 PM4 comments
Amazon, to my mind, may be the leader in the cloud today. But the online giant ain't standing still. It just inked a deal with Citrix to make Windows and Citrix software run optimally on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Citrix has a terrific PR department, but its best PR weapon is CTO Simon Crosby, who is not afraid to speak his rather brilliant mind. We in the press just love this kind of thing.
Crosby praised AWS while tossing barbs at VMware.
VMware got knocked because it calls AWS a "consumer cloud." Crosby believes that, especially with Citrix support, AWS is just fine, and can offer customers "seamless manageability for private and hosted workloads, with role-based, end-to-end management from any enterprise virtualization platform to the cloud."
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/08/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
HP and Microsoft have always been close. Maybe it's all the Windows-based servers and PCs HP sells, but the two get along better than Ozzie and Harriet.
Last year the two lovebirds struck a co-development deal worth a cool quarter of a billion somalians. Now the fruits of that deal are ready to be plucked. HP has an array of appliances that purport to offer a "private cloud in a box."
One appliance is an Exchange server, all set up and ready to go, which can handle around 500 mailboxes. HP also has a range of SQL Server boxes, including a massive data warehousing machine that sells for a mere $2 million. That is some serious crunching.
A number of third parties have built these kinds of plug 'em in and go appliances. While they may be more expensive than a do-it-yourself solution, you can save money in set up and management costs.
Do you like appliances, or prefer the home built approach? Either way, write me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/01/2011 at 12:47 PM1 comments
CloudShare, a company with origins in Israel, last month launched what it called its Winter 2010 Product Lineup.
The key component is CloudShare Enterprise 5.0. This platform is aimed at companies that need to provide training, have a channel strategy and do demos to entice buyers. That describes a lot of companies.
The company also has a free tool, CloudShare Pro, which lets you run virtual machines in the cloud. Supported platforms include Xubuntu, various iterations of Windows Server and Windows clients, as well as MySQL and Microsoft Office.
This week I was briefed by VMtubo, which focuses on virtualization management and also has Israeli routes. It is amazing just how many virtualization startups have either Russian or Israeli ties -- or both! If it wasn't for these two countries, the virt market would have a lot less spunk.
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/01/2011 at 12:47 PM3 comments
When I hear 3X, I think of my shirt size. But when 3X Systems thinks of 3X, they imagine nearly unlimited cloud storage.
The five-year-old company this month released the third version of its remote backup device.
The Tera and 500 series devices are largely aimed at backing up Windows desktops and servers. Where many backup systems are aimed at on-premises computers, 3X can automatically locate remote systems, such as home computers used for work or laptops, and back these up as well.
The newest software supports "granular" recovery of Exchange data, supports bare metal recovery and can backup VMs.
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/01/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
Rackspace Hosting hopes to rack up more customers with faster cloud servers provided by the speed gained through Akamai.
Akamai is one of the pioneers in Web caching. Akamai servers (it has nearly 80,000 of the darn things) cache frequently used data. Because the servers are closer to the customers access is faster.
High volume commercial Web sites were the first to turn to Akamai. Now with Rackspace, that same acceleration technology can be given to corporate apps. Rackspace will begin integrating Akamai into its services in the second quarter.
In some ways Rackspace is playing catch-up to Amazon's home grown content delivery network named CloudFront.
Akamai has an interesting history, having been founded by MIT professor and graduate student Daniel L. Lewin. Lewin, who served as CTO, was on American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, heading to Los Angeles on 9/11. The plane was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center.
Lewin got military training in Israel and reportedly tried to thwart the hijacking. Unfortunately Lewin was wildly outnumbered, had no weapon and was killed by the hijackers. That's a hero.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/18/2011 at 12:47 PM1 comments
Virtualization Review editor-in-chief Bruce Hoard introduced me to a concept I had never heard of before -- cloud brokers.
I kinda thought that IT would choose one cloud provider (or at least one per app) and stick with it. This is due to the fact that IT needs a provider that can support particular demands.
But in some cases, the cloud is just a commodity, so one might want to switch providers based on price, performance or perks. That's where cloud brokers come in. These aren't like suit wearing, martini drinking Wall Street stockbrokers. No, cloud brokers are either an appliance or a service that can swap between cloud providers or manage multiple providers, allowing processing to be moved from cloud to cloud much like we now do with virtual machines. So in a sense, you as the customer decide when to switch or how to share workloads across providers. The software or service does the rest.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/18/2011 at 12:47 PM1 comments
Many IT departments are wary of the cloud because of security ills, lack of control and not knowing exactly what happens when things go wrong. Amazon hopes to allay those fears with a high-end Platinum support plan that promises to respond to problems in 15 minutes. This offering is either $15,000 or 10 percent of overall usage cost.
On the low-end, there's a new $50 a Bronze month plan that may not respond for a full day, but is something that even I could afford.
Amazon also cut the price of two other support offerings, the mid-range Silver and Gold, in half.
Fifteen minutes may seem fast for an oil change or a wait in a doctor's offices, but when your business is on the line (or offline) it seems like an eternity.
What kind of support would you demand for your cloud apps? Pick a number and send it to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/13/2011 at 12:47 PM6 comments
When it comes to cloud productivity apps, Microsoft and Google have relatively the same lineup -- at least on the surface. They both provide productivity basics such as word processing and spreadsheets, e-mail and some form of collaboration. On the server side, Microsoft has a bit more with SQL Server supported by Azure and Sharepoint services. The overlap puts the two at odds when it comes to big cloud contracts. That is exactly what is happening with the U.S. Interior Department.
Initially, Microsoft won the contract that could reach up to 80,000 seats, but Google wasn't even allowed to bid (sounds more like the fault of government bureaucrats than aggressive Microsoft sales folk). Google cried foul over the non-competitive contract, and got a judge to reopen the bidding.
Interior was just looking at Microsoft because that is what they already used on-premise. While it may be an easier route to the cloud, it is not exactly the free enterprise way.
Are cloud productivity apps in your present or future? Share your thoughts by writing [email protected]. We only publish first names, and don't publish company affiliations.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/13/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
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