I guess I've been a bit of a cloud advocate, but hopefully I imbue my prose with true notes of caution. This is one of those times.
Mission-critical apps require serious uptime, which is why IT clusters servers, has failover for virtual machines and spends a fortune on backup and restore. Cloud providers claim you needn't worry about all this, as their huge, efficient datacenters will take care of it all.
Not so fast. Amazon recently had major outages stemming from problems in its Northern Virginia datacenter. This left some customers without service for three full days!
The good news, if there is any good news, is that most Amazon clouds apps aren't mission-critical. Still, if my app was on that cloud, I'd find these outages pretty critical.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/26/2011 at 12:47 PM3 comments
There are a lot of "-aS"es -- SaaS, IaaS and PaaS, for example. SaaS is Software as a Service, IaaS is Infrastructure as a Service, and PaaS is Platform as a Service.
VMware's latest announcement is all about platform. The new Cloud Foundry from VMware is designed to let developers build apps that can be hosted not everywhere, but at least in a lot of places.
Cloud Foundry may signal a new era of openness for VMware. Besides allowing Foundry apps to run on Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services, the tool is IDE-agnostic. You can build apps using Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Spring for Java and more.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/19/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
Office 365 is the well pre-announced replacement of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and both its name and its software should be a marked improvement. The software is one step closer to fruition now that it's in wide-scale beta. Of course, "wide-scale" is relative, as previously a cool 100,000 shops were testing out the software.
Office 365 includes Exchange, Lync and SharePoint, as well as an online version of Office. The suite should ship this summer.
With the popularity of app stores from Apple and Android, Microsoft also decided to launch a marketplace where developers, including corporate users, can sell their wares. More than 100 apps are already for sale.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/19/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
When you think of ERP bigwigs, you probably conjure up SAP and Oracle. But Microsoft is also in this (very big) business. Microsoft didn't build its way into ERP -- it bought its way. Redmond bought Great Plains, Axapta, Solomon and Navision, four separate ERP vendors. That left Microsoft with four separate ERP platforms. Microsoft tried to turn the four into one through Project Green, which it gave up on. Computer scientists know that merging four huge platforms may not be impossible, but it's clearly implausible.
Now Microsoft is doing something also ambitious, but plausible: It wants to take its four ERP lines and make them run on the cloud.
There is no timeframe, which makes sense for a project of this magnitude. What the company does say is the next major rev of all these tools will be cloud-ready.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/19/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
IBM, HP and Dell all agree on one thing: The cloud is huge. Dell is sinking $1 billion of its well earned dollars into the cloud, HP is betting a big chunk of its company on the wispy stuff and IBM last week announced a slew of cloud products and services.
Big Blue (which might have to change its nickname to Big White) announced SmartCloud, a cloud service that is billed by the hour or the month and supports Linux and Windows apps. There are two versions: Enterprise offers 99.5% uptime and Enterprise + stays up 99.9 percent of the time.
Later this year, IBM will run SAP software in its cloud, taking part of the difficult process of getting the software running.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/2011 at 12:47 PM2 comments
The IEEE has been around for eons. It is the George Burns of standards bodies. Now this esteemed and rather elderly group has cloud religion. The august body recently announced two new standards, one for interoperability and the other for application portability.
The standards are aimed at application developers. Write to IEEE specs and you stand a better chance of working with other programs and moving your software from one cloud provider to another.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
Dell says it will spend $1 billion this fiscal year alone on datacenters to support cloud services. Dell plans to open 22 "solution centers" in the next year-and-a-half.
While Microsoft remains a key partner, VMware software will drive much of Dell's new datacenters. Dell did strike a three-year agreement with Microsoft to support Hyper-V and System Center.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/2011 at 12:47 PM6 comments
ZeroDesktop made a bold promise late last month, claiming that its ZeroPC will last a lifetime, and the apps and data that constitute the "PC" can be accessed nearly anywhere and by almost anything with a processor and display.
ZeroPC is basically a virtual desktop, delivered through a browser, where all your apps and info are stored in a central place (like Amazon) in the cloud. Sounds like the old Network Computer concept promoted years ago by Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy. (Is it any wonder Oracle ended up buying Sun?) Beyond serving up productivity apps, ZeroPC offers a single log-on into social media sites, e-mail systems and online consumer storage sites. And like Google Docs or the Web versions of Microsoft apps, others can share your files. Some of this sharing can apparently be done through ThinkFree Online, a productivity suite that comes with ZeroPC.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/05/2011 at 12:47 PM5 comments
If you have anything to do with health care, you know more than you ever wanted about HIPAA, the regulation that is supposed to ensure patient privacy.
The cloud raises a few issues in regard to HIPAA. First, is the data secure? Second, does the provider provide true HIPAA protections? IT outfit Logicalis is offering advice on what to look for in a cloud provider to meet HIPAA demands. Most of it is fairly obvious -- well, obvious once it is all put into words. (Hey, I would have thought of that!) According to Logicalis, a cloud provider should:
- Have someone dedicated to making sure your app meets regulations.
- Have controls so access is only given to those authorized.
- Have policies that ensure HIPAA-level privacy and security.
- Make sure data is encrypted when sitting on the servers and in transit.
- Make sure disaster recovery is proven to work.
- And monitor your apps for possible intrusions.
This all sounds great, but it's also a decent checklist for any app that needs a modicum of security.
I believe in HIPAA, but the doctors' offices I go to must not have read the memo. I've been in waiting rooms where a patient comes in, and in a loud voice the receptionist asks what the patient is there for. "Methadone," the patient says.
"What?"
"METHADONE!" the patient replies.
You call that privacy?
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/05/2011 at 12:47 PM0 comments
One of my peers, Jeff Schwartz, took an in-depth look at how Google and Microsoft cloud enterprise apps and infrastructures compare.
We did the same thing nearly five years ago and the lineups were completely different. Back then, we did a head-to-head review of Gmail versus Hotmail, Windows Live Search (now Bing) versus Google Search, the two companies' desktop search offerings, IM, mapping, calendaring and more. The battle was pretty even.
Obviously, these were all individual, end user-focused tools. That's all changed. Now, the two rivals have real enterprise productivity tools, including full suites of host-enterprise apps. And now Google is going after mobile Web access with Android, and is bucking against old-style fat-client PCs with its thin-client laptops.
Who do you back in this battle? Votes welcome at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 03/29/2011 at 12:47 PM6 comments
I'm spending a lot of time covering the cloud, and I like much of what I see. 2011 will be a year of steady progress. IT will evaluate, test, plan and, in some cases, implement. For many, it will be a year of watching how new cloud solutions mature, and defining the exact economics of these alternatives.
We always like to think that technology changes overnight, and it can in terms of offerings. But actual use is based on lots of testing and lots of analysis. The cloud may be a revolution, but it won't be nearly as quick as the Bolsheviks.
On the other hand, Amazon is prospering. I know, I just the said the cloud will take some time to take over. But one company, Amazon, has been in the business for a long time, and will do quite well this year. If its cloud infrastructure is good enough to power the ever-growing, responsive and uncannily efficient Amazon e-comm business, it should be trustworthy enough for the early cloud pioneers.
Have you tried any cloud services? Give us a full report at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 03/28/2011 at 12:47 PM7 comments
Virtacore recently announced a new on-demand service based on the VMware cloud tool, vCloud. With vCloud Express Virtacore built pools of virtual servers, with users renting capacity on a monthly basis. Plus, customers can ratchet up or down their capacity and simply pay for what they use. According to the company, the service is well suited to two different scenarios: companies that are simply running out of server capacity, and those looking for a quick and easy way to develop and test applications.
The vCloud Express service is built on a public cloud. Virtacore also has another service, Virtacore Private Cloud, which it aims at small and medium-size businesses.
Posted by Doug Barney on 03/22/2011 at 12:47 PM1 comments