Eucalyptus is an open source Infrastructure as a Service cloud offering. What is unique about Eucalyptus is that it is compatible with Amazon AWS APIs.
Eucalyptus leverages operating system virtualization, such as KVM or XEN, to achieve isolation between applications and stacks. Operating system virtualization dedicates CPU and RAM to systems and applications such that they don’t interfere with each other. In cloud parlance, this is called isolation and is essential to achieve multi-tenancy. (For a refresher on basic cloud terminology, see here; for a refresher on Infrastructure as a Service, see here).
Cloud computing layers on top of operating system virtualization and when combined with dynamic allocation of IP addresses, storage and firewall rules creates a service that end users interact with to run instances of images

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Rackspace is close to launching its first Australian data center in Sydney, a multimillion-dollar investment. First customers are expected to go live in late 2012.

Rackspace will be able to offer local dedicated hosting and managed virtualization solutions to larger IT contracts looking to deploy enterprise-grade private cloud solutions based on VMWare that want to keep their data onshore.

The facility is also supposed to serve as a launch pad for Rackspace’s own OpenStack-based Open Cloud platform, when it launches into the local market.

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Hortonworks recently unveiled the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which is 100% open source data management software powered by Apache Hadoop. HDP makes Hadoop easier to install, integrate, manage and use for enterprises and solution providers.
Join us for this webinar as we outline and demo the key features of the Hortonworks Data Platform, including:
Rapid Installation thanks to a wizard that makes it easy to install and provision Hadoop across clusters of machines.
Data Integration Services including Talend Open Studio for Big Data, a visual development environment that allows you to connect to hundreds of data sources without writing code.
Management and Monitoring Services including Hortonworks Management Center, which is an open source and extensible tool that provides intuitive web-based dashboards for monitoring your clusters and creating alerts.
Centralized Metadata Services, including HCatalog, which greatly simplifies data sharing between Hadoop and other enterprise data systems.
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear about Hortonworks Data Platform from the team that created it.

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Neebula is scaling to serve its growing clientele of global enterprises, government and education customers in North America and Europe with the addition of senior leaders to its management team.
Neebula Systems, a provider of business-level service modeling, management, and automated full-stack discovery and dependency mapping solutions,has announced the addition of two senior executives – Bob Johnson, as chief marketing officer, and Ilan Shmargad, as vice president of business development.

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The process of mapping IT computing resources to business services – commonly known as “business service management” (BSM) or “IT service management” (ITSM) – is time-consuming and becomes even trickier when cloud computing gets added into the mix. Neebula is making available a preview of its SaaS-based discovery and mapping product, ServiceWatch.
Neebula Systems, a provider of business-level service modeling, management, and automated full-stack discovery and dependency mapping solutions, invites customers to preview the Neebula ServiceWatch solution in the cloud. For the first time, IT managers will be able to use a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based product to quickly and effectively discover and map IT resources – hardware and software – that make up a specific business service. This eliminates the long, labor-intensive process of installing on-premise software and then manually discovering and mapping IT resources.

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By Patrick Burke

The networking layer of the data center may be the next segment of IT to undergo some disruption, putting it on par with servers and storage, which have seen major changes with the help of cloud computing, virtualisation and other trends designed to improve efficiency and performance.

Software-defined networking, or SDN, has been around for several years now and is utilized by such big-name players as Rackspace.

But the technology is poised to gain more of a foothold in the data center. SDN offers clients more flexibility and less down time if they need to expand from their current server usage.

For the most part, networking has not evolved at the same pace as servers and storage, and networking has become somewhat of a costly bottleneck. SDN’s goal is to take tasks currently handled by hardware and perform these tasks in the software.

The intelligence of …

I saw an unfortunate piece on the Harvard Business Review website the other day that allleged that marketers are “flunking” the Big Data test. The article pointed to a survey that said 89% of marketers surveyed at Fortune 1000 companies use Big Data for only 11% of their customer-related decisions.

The article also made this amazing statement, completely unsupported by any data: “in today’s volatile business environment, judgment built from past experience is increasingly unreliable.” The article went on to cite “once-valid assumptions (such as) older consumers don’t use Facebook or send text messages” that are now erroneous and can presumably sink the intrepid marketer as he or she ventures forth to serve customers.

I ask, who amongst us has ever thought Facebook was the province of the young? Hasn’t it been common (and correct) wisdom for years that a large part of Facebook’s success is based on parents and grandparents (you know, “old people”) using digital cameras and Facebook as today’s Polaroid?

Further, didn’t a generation of Baby Boomer parents get cellphones for their tweens and teens precisely so they could text them at any time to try to keep tabs on them?

The HBR article sets up a strawman argument and a false dichotomy. The fact is, Big Data as defined today is still in its infancy. Many Big Data streams are so large that the software samples it, actually using only 5-10% of it. Other Big Data apps may be set to collect something that a marketing person sees of no value for a particular campaign: the old chestnut, GIGO rears its ugly head again.

Marketing departments, particularly at large-volume, consumer-oriented companies (eg food and drink, clothing, retail) have been the most voracious consumers of data and statistics on the planet for generations now. But they like to see valid data. They like to see useful data.

Big Data is just not mature enough to meet these needs consistently. It’s not a matter of the smart person using data analytics and the stupid person using “gut feeling.” It’s a matter of all marketers using Big Data where it seems to be most relevant. And today, that’s apparently true in 11% of their decisions.

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According to analyst house Gartner, the global app development market is going to hit £5.7 billion ($9bn) by the end of the year, a 1.7% upturn on 2011.

As their latest report, entitled ‘Market Trends: Application Development Software Worldwide’ notes, this will come as a result of the cloud significantly altering the landscape in terms of deploying, designing and testing apps.

Asheesh Raina, Gartner principal research analyst, said: “Application modernisation and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for AD spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility and social computing”.

Specifically, Gartner cited the following as pivotal to app development growth:

• Evolving software delivery models
• New development methodologies
• Emerging mobile application development
• Open source software

The Gartner report notes that cost, agility, flexibility and speed are the key reasons why app developers would want to “cloud-enable” their software.

“Application development for cloud demands rapid …