The fastest to way to cut a data center electric bill is to pull the plug. Of course that would have the CEO screaming more than Rex Ryan after another Mark Sanchez completion -- to the other team!
You can't just shut your data center down unless your Chapter 7 says you can. But you can move apps from your data center to the cloud, shifting the energy load to the service provider.
These service providers are acutely interested in highly efficient, green data centers. There are all kinds of techniques they use: efficient cabling, directing cooling to only that which is hot, and virtualizing everything to reduce the number of devices that need cooling.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/23/20122 comments
Big data is ideal in some ways for the cloud. Once the data is in the cloud, the processing takes place remotely the results and analysis and updates are all that go up or down the wire. Simply put, big data apps shouldn't be chatty like an end-user productivity app with constant interaction.
But big data apps aren't sold at Best Buy. They usually aren't sold at all, but built. Developers tools, therefore, are paramount.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/16/20122 comments
Hadoop is one crazy name for one crazy technology. Apparently the technology was named after a toy elephant, though it still sounds like it tastes pretty good!
Jack Norris with MapR Technologies, which offers a Hadoop distribution, recently told Enterprise Systems Journal why Hadoop makes so much sense in the cloud.
Before we tackle they why's, what is Hadoop anyway. According to Norris "it is a platform that allows enterprises to store and analyze large and growing unstructured data more effectively and economically than ever before. With Hadoop, organizations can process and analyze a diverse set of unstructured data including clickstreams, log files, sensor data, genomic information, and images."
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/16/20120 comments
Security is still bugaboo number one when it comes to the cloud. CipherCloud is hoping to make the cloud less scary with encryption offered through the new CipherCloud Database Gateway.
This tool works with a range of cloud types everything from IaaS to PaaS and SaaS.
The database-oriented gateway encrypts the data while it is "at rest." It works with your own database instances such as SQL Server and Oracle cloud installs as well as database services such as Oracle Database Cloud Service, Microsoft SQL Azure and Amazon RDS.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/11/20124 comments
Packaged software is pretty straightforward. You buy it for a set price, use it, and some time later either buy another or an upgrade. Even with volume licenses, as complex as they can be, you are still essentially just getting a discount with full rights to the package.
Boy, oh boy, is the cloud different. Here you buy access. Sometimes you are buying access to what used to be a packaged app and this is usually fairly simple. Other times you are buying or renting access to services or capacity.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/11/20120 comments
Folks building private clouds often go with what they know, and when it comes to virtual infrastructure what they know is usually VMware. And when it comes to VMware private clouds, vSphere is the way to go.
But vSphere and VMware pricing until recently didn't live up to the sterling reputations of the company's products. Product licensing was based on a rather bizarre approach that charges based on how much memory the tool used. Weird and complicated? Yes. Costly? For sure.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/02/20120 comments
Third parties large and small are moving on-premises wares to the cloud. One advantage is this existing software is presumably stable and debugged. It also offers the ability to have a hybrid install where some software and data stays in the shop while the rest is out in the ether.
This is what Symantec has done with Enterprise Vault.cloud.
The tool was originally just Symantec Enterprise Vault, and did (and still does) e-mail archiving. The cloud version takes all the existing features and adds access from anywhere. Your mail can be read from a browser, smart phone or your trusty PC.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 10/02/20121 comments
There are myriad Web-based storage tools, and the free ones really ain't that bad. The paid ones are even better.
For pure backup I use Carbonite, and the $55 a year is little to pay for peace of mind. I guess I'd like to see the service double as a cloud check in and checkout service for files for when I'm on a different machine. My guess is they are working on that somewhere, just waiting for the technology and business needs to crash into each other.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/26/20122 comments
VMware used to be a hypervisor company. Then it became a company with a hypervisor surrounded by a bunch of management tools. Then there were more and more management tools, along with storage.
Then the third parties really kicked, building apps that tie into richer versions of the hypervisor. Before long VMware was a full-blown platform company.
In fact, many customers buy a range of related VMware tools that transform large swaths of internal datacenters.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/26/20122 comments
Thinking about putting Exchange in the cloud? Nah. You might lose all your mail. SQL Server? Too mission critical and too much transactional data going back and forth -- your performance would stink worse than week old striper.
SharePoint -- now there's the sweet spot. Not exactly mission critical, no real transactions to bring the T-1 to its knees. And so many of these apps are tactical. These puppies have to go up fast and simple. Last thing it needs is to get bogged down building a bunch of SharePoint servers just for a small team on a short term project. With the cloud, IT can ignore the whole thing and let the small team with the short-term project do it all themselves.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/18/20125 comments
When I think of big data I don't really think of the cloud. First I think of big servers and big processors. Then I think of in-memory where this data is in RAM for lightning fast analysis. This sure ain't the cloud.
The other problem is big data doesn't fit well over the clogged pipes that lead to and from the cloud. However if your big data is somehow already all up in the cloud and if you are just sending instructions to manipulate it, then you don't have to buy the big servers with the big processors. There, the cloud might just make sense.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/18/20120 comments
Just when I was starting to figure out SaaS vs, IaaS and PaaS, now comes private vs. public PaaS. Fortunately there is Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState to make sense of it all.
First, platform as a service. You probably know what it means, but it's a fairly new term so there's nothing wrong with making sure we all know what we're talking about.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/11/20121 comments