Not only are more businesses adopting some form of cloud technology, they are feeling better doing it. A recent survey of 500 IT decision-makers found that 85 percent felt more positive about the benefits of using cloud computing, up from 72 percent in 2011, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The survey, conducted by IT industry association CompTIA, found that more than eight in 10 companies use some form of cloud technology. For many companies, the cloud is defined by a SaaS offering like Web email, but almost a quarter reported that cloud components made up between 30 percent and 50 percent of their overall IT architecture. More than half said they planned to increase investments by 10 percent or more over the course of the year. When asked to identify the top driver for cloud implementation, 50 percent of respondents picked “Cost-cutting,” but “Simply better option” and “Modernization of legacy IT” were not far behind in votes.

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“We are excited to enable the next generation of software-defined data centers and drive complexity out of the most challenging layer of the data center today — storage,” said Anil Virmani, senior vice president of engineering at Coraid, as the Redwood City based leading developer of Ethernet-based storage solutions today unveiled its EtherCloud™ platform for software-defined storage.

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Infrastructure metrics have always been focused on speeds and feeds. Throughput, packets per second, connections per second, etc… These metrics have been used to evaluate and compare network infrastructure for years, ultimately being used as a critical component in data center design.
This makes sense. After all, it’s not rocket science to figure out that a firewall capable of handling 10,000 connections per second (CPS) will overwhelm a next hop (load balancer, A/V scanner, etc… ) device only capable of 5,000 CPS.

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We’re here to help you understand the reality of the situation in order to provide insight. And like it or not, we have a Cyberwar on our hands—and as with other wars, technology defines and constrains the rules of engagement. Yesterday we may have spoken about tanks or guns; today we speak of viruses and worms. But as with traditional machines of war, the human element is every bit as important as the technology, if not more so.
The latest Cyberattack to hit the news: a worm called Gauss, a relative of Stuxnet, targeted certain Lebanese banks. Kaspersky, a Russian security firm, discovered the attack. On their blog post, the Kaspersky researchers note that “after looking at Stuxnet…, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Gauss comes from the same ‘factory’ or ‘factories.’ All these attack toolkits represent the high end of nation-state sponsored cyber-espionage and cyberwar operations, pretty much defining the meaning of ‘sophisticated malware.’” They go on to say that “this is actually the first time we’ve observed a nation-state cyber-espionage campaign with a banking Trojan component.”

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A headline theme for our next webinar will be ‘Microsoft Private Cloud 2.0′. Private Cloud Application Platform Two years ago I described an upcoming market that I initially defined as the Private Cloud Application Platform. Recently Microsoft began prosecuting this space with their PCSS initiative, the Private Cloud Solutions Suite, bringing together a partner group […]

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Coraid on Wednesday unveiled EtherFlash™ Cache, a flexible programmable cache that uses solid-state drives (SSDs) to accelerate read performance for demanding server virtualization, web, database and email applications. Users can provision and then rapidly re-assign application priorities in the cache to provide a performance boost to the applications that need it most.

“The explosive growth of dynamic virtualized and cloud architectures has made ensuring application service levels ever more challenging,” said Doug Dooley, vice president, product management, at Coraid. “Software-defined storage platforms combine smart software and scale-out commodity hardware like SSDs to get the right resources to the right application at the right time. EtherFlash Cache allows operators of cloud infrastructures to dynamically apply policies and priorities to applications.”

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Too often, Information Technology leadership lives in its own world, far removed from business decision-making. This can result in IT being an easy target for blame. If everything goes well, IT is a high-spend cost center. If things go poorly, then IT isn’t doing its job. Non-strategic IT departments are too often seen as the bad guys—They are an obstacle, a process-loving bureaucratic group that slows everything down…Other departments must find a way around IT in order to launch those pet projects quickly. Now you, the CIO, are caught in a downward spiral, spending more time fighting political battles, less time addressing your organization’s immediate tech needs and zero time planning for the future. The IT Ops team is in a constant scramble to keep up, overburdened with administrivia and maintaining uptime. In this bleak picture, IT isn’t exactly a potent weapon in the battle for innovation.

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Enterprise IT has a disturbing tendency to get excited about technology rather than architecture and planning.
According to David Linthicum, this sorry state is quite evident as cloud computing begins to take hold in the standard IT technology arsenal.
“The fact of the matter is that there are two worlds. One involves the hype and good feelings about next-gen IT, such as cloud computing, that tells us the technology itself will save us from the mistakes of the past. Then there’s the world of planning, architecture, and design that makes the technology actually useful – despite IT’s aversion to this crucial stage,” Linthicum writes.
The problem is not the fault of hyped technology, nor of those whom build and sell it. In many cases, the hyped technology works. Cloud computing is no exception.

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