Boy, that cloud sure does sound great. All those admins can get pink slips and the air conditioners in the server room can be redeployed at the CEO's summer house. What could possibly go wrong?
But an insightful reader pointed out that if your WAN is slow (and many are), your cloud apps will be sluggish, as well. And as more and more application processing moves over these wires, latency becomes, well, more latent. A 10-gig Ethernet used to be overkill and was needed only by service providers. As the cloud continues to grow, we may need 10 gigs everywhere.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/30/20117 comments
Some of the same folks that built Amazon's EC2 are now behind a startup called Nimbula, presumably a takeoff on the word "nimbus." (By the way, there is a storage company called Nimbus and an open source Infrastructure as a Service project also called Nimbus.)
Nimbula hopes to become the Microsoft Windows of the cloud with an operating system called Director 1.5. This newest version is designed to support clouds that are distributed all over the world.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/16/20110 comments
Software licensing is way more complicated than it needs to be, and moving to the cloud, especially using your existing apps, offers a whole new wrinkle.
Microsoft, which is "all in the cloud," wants its customers equally in, and is tweaking its Software Assurance volume licensing program to ease the transition. The basic idea is through "license mobility" you can use what you already paid for to run on your servers and move that software to the cloud.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/16/20111 comments
Very few people I know buy a car without taking a test drive (my mother is an exception here).
Service and communications provider Logicalis clearly wants your business, and wants you to head to either Irvine, Calif. or Farmington Hill, Mich. to land it. That's where you'll find two so-called "Cloud Centers of Excellence."
The idea is that IT can see for itself that cloud infrastructure is not much different from in-house infrastructure: They both have networks, servers and storage (hopefully with fully vetted restore). Besides hoping to make the customer confident in the service provider, the centers are also meant to show that cloud functionality can be built on top of existing IT systems.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/02/20111 comments
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) spends a heckuva a lot of money every year, and now some of that scratch is heading Google's way. The GSA just finished migrating its old e-mail system to Google Apps for Government. The migration included 17,000 users and took half a year.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/02/20114 comments
OpenStack, an open source platform for building clouds (both public and private), just turned the ripe young age of 1. The party, held in London, was a largely European affair; they may have even served gelato instead of ice cream.
OpenStack has a number of commercial supporters, chief among them Rackspace, Citrix and Dell. It's pretty cool to see a pure open source system gain this kind of traction against multibillion dollar corporations. Can't wait to see what OpenStack does once it learns how to actually walk and talk!
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/26/20112 comments
Many of you love the cloud and have moved apps and data over. Others are skeptical and curious, which may be why you read this newsletter and blog.
For enterprises, the cloud can be safe if you have the right provider, the right contract provisions, and the right backup and recovery strategy. (Recovery is a lot harder than backup, eh what?) For individuals, the cloud is still a risky thing -- just ask the man who calls himself Thomas Monopoly.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/26/20115 comments
It wasn't too long ago that the online version of Exchange went down longer than all of Mike Tyson's opponents put together.
Whoops. Exchange went down again more recently, this time for three hours. That may not seem like much, but the marathon record now stands at under two hours and four minutes. Apocalypse Now, a long movie in its day, was only 153 minutes long, and the 1989 Tour de France was won by only eight seconds.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/26/20116 comments
It's no real surprise that virtualization and the cloud are very much related. After all, most cloud services run off of virtualized platforms. This puts VMware in the cat bird's seat, and the company is taking full advantage. Its latest move is vSphere 5, a massive virtualization and cloud suite.
Much of the work focuses on administration. The goal is for IT to set core policies and then have vSphere essentially manage itself from then on. Sounds too good to be true, so we'll be tracking this little promise.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/19/20116 comments
Like VMware, virtualization powerhouse Citrix wants a big chunk of the cloud. (Do clouds have chunks or just wisps?) Citrix has certainly built its share of cloud tools, but now it is also buying its way into the market. Case in point: Cloud.com, which Citrix just picked up for an undisclosed sum.
Cloud.com is in the infrastructure-as-a-service market and its stuff runs on all the major hypervisors. That fits Citrix's strategy to a T as Citrix supports its own Xen hypervisor as well as Hyper-V. Cloud.com's key tool is the open source Java-based CloudStack, which turns datacenters into a service, and self-heals or at least protects itself through robust failover.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/19/20111 comments