Savvis may be the first major cloud provider to deploy Hewlett-Packard's new Moonshot servers for customers looking to lower the footprints of their datacenters amidst increasing capacity requirements. Moonshot, launched Monday, represents one of the most significant changes in server architectures since the transition to blade servers a decade ago. However, the emphasis is on introducing low-power processors equipped in low-end notebook PCs and tablets to large server farms.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/11/20131 comments
In a move that promises to make it easier for organizations to deploy standardized public and private clouds based on OpenStack, systems integrator Mirantis yesterday released its configuration and deployment libraries called Fuel to the open source community under the Apache 2 license.
The open sourcing of Fuel is noteworthy because Mirantis has used it for 40 customers that have stood up OpenStack-based clouds, among them eBay's PayPal subsidiary, Cisco's WebEx division, The Gap and NASA, which wrote and stood up the first OpenStack cloud based on its Nebula platform. Mirantis has also supplied Fuel to Internap, which launched the first public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud based on OpenStack in 2011 and Dell, according to Mirantis Co-Founder and Executive VP Boris Renski.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/26/20130 comments
Oracle last week said it has acquired Nimbula, a company launched in 2010 by some of the original developers of Amazon Web Services EC2.
Nimbula Director is a cloud operating system designed to let enterprises and independent hosting providers build multitenant and geographically EC2-compatible public, private and hybrid Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments. CEO and Co-Founder Chris Pinkham was a VP of engineering at Amazon, who led the development of EC2.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/20/20131 comments
SunGard this week released a Software a Service (SaaS) app designed to let less-technical operations personnel create and track their enterprise and disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
The company, regarded as the leading provider of disaster recovery services for large enterprises, said its new SunGard Assurance app is geared toward those in the lines of business and at branch offices who don't typically deal with ensuring business continuity should a site become unavailable for any number of reasons, such as a major storm, earthquake, fire, flood or some other catastrophic event.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/20/20130 comments
Just two weeks after IBM committed to build its cloud computing infrastructure software and services around OpenStack, the company may be looking to acquire a major Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, according to published reports.
Citing a former IBM exec, GigaOM said in addition to its interest in rapidly growing IaaS provider SoftLayer (reported by Reuters last week), IBM has also been eying Rackspace. Earlier reports that EMC was also interested in SoftLayer have been dismissed. It's unclear to what extent IBM pursued Rackspace or whether the company is going to make an imminent move to acquire any cloud provider. An IBM spokeswoman said the company "does not comment on rumors or speculation."
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/19/20130 comments
IBM is aligning all of its cloud infrastructure offerings around OpenStack, the open source effort initiated by Rackspace and NASA nearly three years ago.
While Big Blue was an earlier participant in the project and now a platinum sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, it waited until last year to publicly acknowledge its involvement in the OpenStack initiative. On Monday, IBM threw all of its weight behind the project.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/04/20133 comments
The fur was flying this week after VMware's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, told partners to do what it takes to keep customers from migrating their workloads to the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
Speaking at VMware's Partner Exchange Conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, Gelsinger warned the company's top partners that "a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever," according to CRN's account of the event.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/01/20133 comments
Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud storage service went down worldwide late Friday afternoon, just as I was getting ready to call it a week. An expired SSL certificate was the cause of the outage, Microsoft eventually confirmed.
The Windows Azure outage -- which lasted into Saturday -- is ironic, given last week's study that indicated Windows Azure storage offered the fastest response times out of five large cloud networks, beating those operated by Amazon Web Services, Google, HP and Rackspace. Good thing for Microsoft that Nasuni, the vendor that ran the study, wasn't testing Windows Azure this weekend.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/26/20134 comments
The reason there's so much hype around cloud computing is the promise that it will reduce infrastructure costs while providing compute and storage capacity on demand. But, of course, moving to cloud computing doesn't necessarily guarantee cost savings.
In the latest reminder of that dichotomy, a survey of 1,300 businesses in the United States and United Kingdom released last week by Rackspace showed that 66 percent found cloud computing has reduced their IT costs, while 17 percent said it failed to do so. The remainder had no opinion. Yet another survey commissioned by Internap, which runs 12 datacenters throughout the United States, primarily for colocation but also for its cloud computing business, suggests that of the 65 percent who said they are considering the use of cloud services, 41 percent expect them to reduce their costs.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/26/20133 comments
Microsoft's Windows Azure BLOB storage performed significantly better in a shootout among five leading providers of public cloud infrastructure services, including last year's runaway winner Amazon Web Services.
Nasuni, a closely-held supplier of turnkey data protection appliances that use public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers' object storage repositories as backup and recovery targets, conducted the shootout for the second year in a row. While Nasuni officials said they conducted more exhaustive tests, such as by benchmarking a wider range of file sizes (from 1KB to 1GB), the company only compared five preferred IaaS providers -- Amazon, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Rackspace -- compared with 16 last year.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/19/20130 comments
Amazon Web Services today launched an application management service aimed at making it easier for developers to automate the process of modeling, deploying and scaling their apps.
The new service, called AWS OpsWorks, takes management templates developed from Opscode called Chef Recipes, designed to provide flexible capacity provisioning, configuration management and deployment, while allowing administrators to manage access control and to monitor the app, the company said Tuesday. Administrators can use AWS OpsWorks from the AWS Management Console.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/19/20130 comments
When Dell acquired cloud integration upstart Boomi in 2010, its goal was to become a leading provider of connectivity from private to public cloud application services. Dell this week said its tools are used for 1 million integrations per day.
What does that mean? Boomi founder and GM of the business unit Rick Nucci described an integration as the execution of a process which moves data between two or more applications. For example, when a sales rep closes a deal and enters the data into a CRM system, you need to invoice the customer. That means connecting the CRM system to the billing app, Nucci explained.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/12/20130 comments