China Mobile has just announced in the OpenNebula’s blog that its flagship cloud infrastructure, Big Cloud Elastic Computing, is going to production in few months using OpenNebula as cloud management platform. Big Cloud is the cloud computing software stack developed by China Mobile Research Institute to support China Mobile‘s operation platform and provide services to its more than 600 million customers. China Mobile started to experiment with OpenNebula in 2008, four years ago, and since then the China Mobile Research Institute has developed new components to address the specific demands of its target customers.
Archivo mensual: julio 2012
Technology Companies Select SoftLayer over Competition
Today’s hottest tech companies are relying on SoftLayer Technologies to achieve the scalability, performance and the time-to-market they require. Companies like AppFirst, Cloudant and Struq are turning to SoftLayer to rapidly develop and build-out their online services, because the company delivers a flexible Internet-scale platform that meshes virtualized and physical resources, all available in real time, on demand.
“Confusing pricing schemes, long term lock-in contracts and performance bottlenecks were pretty much all we saw when we contracted with other big cloud providers,” said David Roth, CEO of AppFirst. “Our solution is constantly streaming data from thousands of servers residing in more than 70 countries worldwide and we can’t afford a sub-standard platform. SoftLayer invested in what we needed most – amazing automation that allows us to be in control and no long-term contract or exorbitant prices. SoftLayer delivers a top-notch solution for business like ours, running on both virtual and physical servers, delivering a best-in-class networking infrastructure.”
Does Cloud Matter? (Part 2)
I rambled a bit yesterday about whether cloud computing matters. I concluded that it does, for no other reason than your company needs to keep up with its current and potential future competitors. But it’s difficult to make this argument in a traditional way.
For example, years ago, if your company was slow to get PCs, and still kept paper forms in shoeboxes and file cabinets, you were going to become sluggish, quickly, and probably go out of business.
If you didn’t move to a relational database, you were going to be impossibly flat-footed compared to your competition in learning about your customers and serving them.
And if you dilly-dallied too long with a website strategy, you risked getting swept up by an irreversible online commerce tide.
The cloud’s not like that. Most times, you won’t even know if there’s a cloud in place in any particular transaction. So much of the cloud talk these days is “inside baseball” stuff – written for developers and other IT people who are invoking these clouds.
Sure, there’s lots of fun talk about devices – does your iPhone make you a cognoscente or poseur, does my Android device make me practical or a loser? But that’s just idle talk, something to pass the time.
The Bigs
The real cloud issues today have to do with stacks and structures. The latest big news, of course, is VMware buying Nicira and assembling its own “death star” to compete with Amazon Web Serivces, Google’s new Compute Engine, and Rackspace.
But that big news has little to do with most businesses. That big news can be viewed as meta-cloud to most companies, the underlying structure of what it is they want to do. The rival death stars bring no new capabilities, the way that word processors, spreadsheets, relational databases, and websites brought.
And, the wishful thinking goes, businesses are less likely to get locked into one of these integrated solutions than they have been to get locked into a single big vendor or two for the past several decades. The reality is that potential vendor lock-in here will likely stall the growth of public cloud rather than spur it.
There is a competitive battle of the highest order going on among the emerging cloud-computing camps. There are some great built-in conflicts, ie, “co-opetition issues.” Cloud matters deeply to these folks, and their organizations literally hang in the balance.
How Does It Matter To You?
But for most businesses, it is a more subtle exercise to see how much cloud matters. Look to see how you can improve your own operations. Are you being held back by not being able to buy enough computing resources? Do you wish you could focus more on your core business rather than your IT department? Do you have seasonal, monthly, or daily spikes? Is your like-sized competition somehow able to move more quickly than you, and able to offer a more sophisticated online experience? Do you have the creativity but not the resources to outwit a much larger competitor?
This is where cloud matters to you. Cloud’s true benefits come the form of a better company, not simply a new product. Its breakthrough nature is not screamingly obvious as was the spreadsheet, the relational database, the website. But over the long haul, I’m sure you’ll find it to be transformative.
Video Provides Insight into VMware’s Reasons for Buying Nicera
VMware is buying Nicera, the “VMware of Networking”, for $1.26 BILLION. This video offers some insight into why.
Better Insight and Control over IT
HP has introduced HP Configuration Management System 10, a broad update designed to give more types of IT leaders better insight and control over everything from discrete IT devices to complete services-enabled business processes.
Especially important for the operational control of hybrid services delivery and converged cloud implementations, CMS 10 gathers and shares the configuration patterns and characteristics of highly virtualized workloads. The update helps manage dynamic virtualized applications both inside enterprise data centers as well as leading clouds.
Alpha Exchange Partners with Xignite to Deliver Canadian Securities Market Data
Xignite Inc. and Alpha Market Services Inc., the data distributor for Toronto Based Alpha Exchange, today announced their agreement to launch new services offering access to Alpha Exchange real-time and historical market data via the Internet. Alpha Exchange trades securities listed on the TSX, TSX Venture and Alpha Exchange listing markets. Alpha Exchange has roughly 20% of Canadian market share and will leverage Xignite’s leading financial market data cloud solutions to deliver data through easy to consume application programming interfaces (APIs). These services are ideally suited to fuel the next generation enterprise and mobile applications, increasing the Exchange’s global reach.
“Alpha Exchange prides itself in being a leader in innovation, an enabler of technological initiatives and a proponent of market data democratization,” stated Jos Schmitt, CEO of Alpha Exchange. “Putting in place a market data cloud solution with Xignite as well as being its first non-US exchange partner is a natural but also a very exciting step forward for the Exchange.”
The first phase, scheduled for the beginning of August, will include the addition of Alpha Exchange’s last sale data to the award winning Xignite Market Data Cloud platform available via Xignite.com. The data will include real-time last sale prices and minute-level tick bars for all securities trading on Alpha Exchange. For pricing and availability, call 1(650)655-3700 or email dataexperts@xignite.com.
“We are delighted that Alpha has recognized the Market Data Cloud’s potential to grow its global business,” stated Stephane Dubois, CEO and founder of Xignite Inc. “This relationship marks an important step in expanding access to global financial market data.”
The second phase includes the launch of the Alpha Data Cloud, a rich suite of cloud-based market data services powered by the XigniteOnDemand platform, and is slated for Q4 2012. The Alpha Data Cloud will provide easy and cost effective access to real-time data via Internet for customers around the world, and provide a one-stop shop for all Alpha Exchange historical and reference data. The service will allow customers to access the data via APIs, to download custom subsets of historical data, to subscribe to reoccurring data delivery or to replay a full day of trades and quotes.
Cloud Computing: Private PaaS for the Enterprise
“We’re all about developers and enterprise and open source. We have a suite of tools all the way up from code to cloud,” stated Bart Copeland, President & CEO of ActiveState Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Ping Identity to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Ping Identity, The Cloud Identity Security Leader™, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Ping Identity provides cloud identity security solutions to more than 800 of the world’s largest companies, government organizations and cloud businesses. With a 99% customer satisfaction rating, Ping Identity empowers 45 of the Fortune 100 to secure hundreds of millions of employees, customers, consumers and partners using secure, open standards like SAML, OpenID and OAuth. Businesses that depend on the Cloud rely on Ping Identity to deliver simple, proven and secure cloud identity management through single sign-on, federated identity management, mobile identity security, API security, social media integration, and centralized access control.
Why Are More and More Businesses Moving to the Cloud? (Infographic)
Cloud Computing: Redefining Storage Architecture
“We are an Ethernet SAN company and we help people who are trying to build out Cloud architectures. As people are moving to Big Data and cloud they have to think hard and rethink their storage architectures,” explained John Gilmartin, Vice President of Product Marketing at Coraid, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.