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By Charlton, on December 10th, 2009
Verizon Eats Its Own Clouds
Verizon Communications has reduced operating costs and boosted IT performance 400% by restructuring its cloud-computing processes internally and switching to a virtual approach in its data center through an aggressive process of consolidating its hardware and software platforms, the company said at an industry event today. “We were able to reduce our costs to one-third or less of what we were spending,” said Fari Ebrahimi, chief information officer for Verizon Services.
Verizon’s cited 400% performance improvement and cost reduction of 66% for their IT was achieved through virtualization, consolidation and outsourcing (in particular in their [...]
By Charlton, on December 10th, 2009
TM Forum announced the formation of an ecosystem of major industry players in the emerging cloud services sector.
The centerpiece of this effort is the creation of the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC) whose goal is to understand the needs of the largest global cloud buyers and ensure any impediments to the uptake of cloud technology are removed.
Together with key service and technology suppliers, the ecosystem will initiate a range of programs designed to remove barriers to the growth of commercial cloud services.
Among the enterprise buyers joining this effort are Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deutsche Bank.
“Cloud computing has the potential to [...]
By Charlton, on December 3rd, 2009
Intel’s Software Tools group has announced a cloud-based “scalability service.” The Intel Parallel Universe Portal is an on-demand cloud-computing analysis tool that tests 32-bit Windows-based parallel applications. The service lets software developers assess how their applications will perform on a number of multicore processor configurations — 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 hardware threads — without having large multicore systems in-house.
Essentially, what Intel has done is reuse in the cloud the technology currently being used by its Parallel Amplifier tool (part of the Parallel Studio tool suite), which is designed to find multicore performance bottlenecks. The results of the [...]
By Charlton, on November 30th, 2009
Despite the huge changes in technology, the debate over Cloud would have been remarkably similar 20 years ago. The proponent would have said that current technologies have years of investment and billions of dollars on their side and that the challenger is too risky, too unproven, too lightweight. It would be foolhardy to open up access to corporate data or to give so many people access to so much computing power. No sensible company would allow it. The opposition would have said that the opportunities far outweighed the risk, that we stand at the beginning of a new era of technological [...]
By Charlton, on November 12th, 2009
SLAs and security go together; each is meaningless without the other. As the cloud computing market matures, vendors will differentiate themselves by the security features (and other SLA details) they provide. The spectacular failure of Sidekick/Microsoft-Danger; Amazon and Google’s outages; and the shrug-and-grin policy of Yahoo! are all examples of cloud FAILs due to weak or non-existent SLAs. Referencing existing (i.e., pre-cloud and non-cloud) standards for security, auditability, data retention and destruction, reliability, availability, etc., is an unambiguous way of specifying exactly what the vendor will provide and exactly what the consumer can expect.
If you are a provider or consumer, what standards would we want in the SLAs? Here are [...]
By Charlton, on October 18th, 2009
From health care systems to cellphones, Steve Ballmer wants Microsoft “to invent everything that’s important on the planet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/business/18msft.html?th&emc=th
Microsoft is very much aware that they are facing a present where the traditional desktop OS and traditional thick desktop apps (i.e. Office) are being squeezed and a future where these lines will have less relevance. Without a path forward – MS Online (the first full Cloud app suite for SMB/Enterprise – essentially MS Office in the Cloud with Rich Services clients) and to make “Cloud run better on Win7″ – Microsoft is looking at a bleak future with diminishing revenue streams.
The greatest [...]
By Charlton, on October 14th, 2009
The very public and spectacular Microsoft/Danger/Sidekick failure has been a rallying cry for those who detract as well as over-simplify Cloud Computing. A large part of the discussion has focussed on the fragility of CC services and storage, and the over-hying of CC. However, this reaction is itself anti-CC hype, failing to truly understand the implications of the failure. A recent blog entry from Dan Dilger provides a reasoned analysis that should provide a cautionary tale against:
Assuming “if you build it, they will come” (referring to wishful-thinking RAS),
Shrug-and-grin, fluff SLAs (referring to “SLAs” which essentially state “caveat emptor” and “we are [...]
By Charlton, on October 12th, 2009
Analysts Examine Latest Industry Trends During Gartner
Symposium/ITxpo, October 18-22, in Orlando
ORLANDO, Fla., October 20, 2009 —
Gartner, Inc. analysts today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2010. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 22.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
These technologies impact the organisation’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They [...]
By Charlton, on October 8th, 2009
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139016/CIA_endorses_cloud_computing_but_only_internally
One of the U.S. government’s strongest advocates of cloud computing is also one of its most secretive operations: the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has adopted cloud computing in a big way, and the agency believes that the cloud approach makes IT environments more flexible and secure.
Jill Tummler Singer, the CIA’s deputy CIO, said that she sees enormous benefits to a cloud approach. And while the CIA has been moving steadily to build a cloud-friendly infrastructure — it has adopted virtualization, among other things — cloud computing is still a relatively new idea among federal agencies.
“Cloud computing as a term [...]
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