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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/08/20114 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/08/20110 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."
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/01/20111 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/01/20113 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/01/20110 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/18/20111 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/13/20116 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/13/20112 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/13/20111 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/16/20105 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.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/16/20106 comments