Less than six months after shipping, Office 365 got its third update. The first two were modest; this one has some real meat.
Like the on-premise version of the Office productivity suite, Office 365 has tight links to SharePoint. The update gives it closer ties to the document repository and collaboration platform. These ties revolve essentially around the Web version of SharePoint, which makes sense for the Web-based Office 365.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/13/20112 comments
Oracle has bought its way into many a market -- Java, ERP, even server hardware. It also has a role to play in application servers. It got into this area by buying BEA a few years back, which bought WebLogic way back in 1998.
Now Oracle is on the 12th iteration of the WebLogic server, a version designed to build and migrate apps to the cloud. WebLogic Server 12c ("c" for "cloud") is designed to support private cloud apps or programs meant to run on Oracle's Exalogic cloud. WebLogic is meant for Java developers and supports Oracle's JRockit Java Virtual Machine.
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/13/20110 comments
Guess who invented virtualization and when? VMware in the late '90s? Citrix in the very late '80s? Try IBM, which in 1968 shipped the very first hypervisor, which ran on the IBM System/360 Model 67 mainframe. Some of those same engineers who worked on that hypervisor later helped build hypervisors for System p and other high-end IBM servers.
So what about mainframes, now dubbed the System z? It is not well-known, but the System z has long been able to virtualize AIX and Linux workloads. The biggest of the big iron can act as some 2,500 discrete servers.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/06/20113 comments
In most cases, IT looks at the cloud carefully, moves forward tentatively and -- if it likes what it sees -- adds more services as time moves along. Rare is the shop that slams the whole thing in reverse faster than a Hollywood stunt driver. But analytics vendor Mixpanel did just that, and blogged about its reasoning.
The company had high hopes for the cloud, buying into the promises of low cost and elasticity. However, theory and practice were two very different things. The company recently backed out of its Rackspace service, opting for a dedicated solution.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/06/20116 comments
The battle for cloud partners continues with Microsoft winning the hand of Fujitsu, which is using Microsoft's Windows Azure to power its new Fujitsu Hybrid Cloud Services.
Fujitsu is doing far more than just loading Azure and SQL cloud services onto servers in its datacenter. It is making more of a services and consulting play, hoping to help IT build clouds that rest in the on-premise datacenter and span out to the external cloud. On the private side, Fujitsu is offering to help IT build and install internal Azure programs that run on Windows servers.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/29/20110 comments
How would you like to spend eight hours taxing the computing power of a cluster of 30,000 cores? Heck, with that, I could finally get my taxes done in time.
Some lucky researchers are going to get all that computing time -- a $10,000 value -- for free. This all comes courtesy of Cycle Computing, a supercomputing company. The CycleCloud BigScience Challenge (I guess the company isn't a fan of spaces between words!) is open to nonprofit researchers trying to do good. CycleCloud is a platform building cloud-based HPC apps.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/29/20111 comments
The cloud can be a big, scary place. For as long as there have been IT departments, IT has had more or less full control of the infrastructure. With a datacenter, you can walk around all your gear, replace drives, reboot, update software and sometimes just stroll around happily seeing everything humming.
You can't see the cloud. You can't cruise around it (unless you're Superman). And your service provider is the one that gets to reboot the servers. In short, IT no longer has the control it is used to. According to a recent survey by cloud storage purveyor Nasuni, almost half of those questioned have serious reservations about losing control when moving to the cloud.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/29/20110 comments
I'm sure nearly all major competitors would disagree, but Microsoft claims to be the one and only company to offer all three major styles of cloud computing: private, public and the blend called hybrid.
The claim was made at a recent investor event by Microsoft GM Charles Di Bona, who also took the opportunity to give Wall Street a crash course in cloud.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/20112 comments
I'm not a huge fan of research commissioned and released by vendors, since it is clearly self-serving. But that doesn't mean it's wrong (nor is it necessarily right). Just call me a bit skeptical.
Earlier this month, cloud file storage provider Egnyte (I don't know what the name means either) released research done by Forrester Consulting arguing that on-premise file servers should and will be killed off. Actually, the "killed off" part seems to be Egnyte's conclusion, which seems to be a reach.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/20112 comments
Best Buy is best-known for selling stuff, not buying it. That all changed recently when the electronics retailer thought is was best to buy mindShIFT for a cool $167 million (that's a lot of flat screens).
What makes mindSHIFT so valuable and how does it fit in with Best Buy? It all starts with Geek Squad, which Best Buy also bought rather than built. As you know, the Geeks support small businesses and individuals. They have saved the bacon of tech newbies and power users alike. Meanwhile, mindSHIFT aims at the enterprise, offering SharePoint consulting, app development, cloud infrastructure and cloud-based apps.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/20112 comments
Microsoft has been battling with Google over all the big cloud productivity deals. Redmond has already lost deals to the federal government and the city of Los Angeles. Recently, General Motors was up for grabs; looks like Google also won this one.
The Wall Street Journal is saying that GM has a deal to use Google Apps enterprisewide, but that the actual rollout is still not 100 percent defined -- or perhaps official. The deal could mean 100,000 users for Google and one huge Google Apps reference account.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/08/20115 comments
I don't anyone who would argue that the U.S. government is the most efficient organization in the world. But it does have hundreds of thousands of well-educated employees with plenty of time -- at least, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (or 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., depending on their department) -- to study various issues.
Lately, government brain cells have been working on how best to move to the cloud. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is leading the charge. Two of the group's three planned volumes on the subject are now out for public comment.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/08/20111 comments