Twelve Reasons Why Private Clouds Are Better Than Public Clouds

Joe McKendrick reviews Jason Bloomberg’s new book and posits that public cloud is better than private cloud and he provides twelve very valid reasons.
Yes, the debate is fierce between private and public….. security, cost, control, compliance
In response, here are my twelve reasons why private cloud is better than public.
Your organization controls the network and infrastructure of a private cloud
You don’t incur high MPLS costs – network costs to transfer data and workloads between your datacenter and the public cloud
You are not susceptible to public cloud outages – Amazon apologized to Netflix in December

read more

Cloud Conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 Overview | Part 1

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added EBS Optimized support for enhanced bandwidth EC2 instances (read more here). This industry trends and perspective cloud conversation is the first (looking at EBS) in a three part series companion to the AWS EBS optimized post found here. Part II is here (closer look at S3) and part III is here (tying it all together).
For those not familiar, Simple Storage Services (S3), Glacier and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) are part of the AWS cloud storage portfolio of services. There are several other storage and data related service for little data database (SQL and NoSql based) other offerings include compute, data management, application and networking for different needs shown in the following image.

read more

OpenNebula 4.0 Beta Enterprise Cloud Management Platform Is Out

The OpenNebula Project has just announced the beta release of the fourth major version of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source enterprise-grade solution to build and manage virtualized data centers and enterprise clouds. The project has come a long way since the first “technology preview” of OpenNebula five years ago. This latest release is the realization of a vision of simplicity, openness, code-correctness and a sysadmin-centric approach.
OpenNebula 4.0 brings valuable contributions from many of its thousands of deployments that include leading research and supercomputing centers like CERN, FermiLab, NASA, ESA and SARA; and industry leaders like Blackberry, ChinaMobile, Dell, Cisco, Akamai and Telefonica O2. As an enterprise-class product, OpenNebula offers an upgrade path so all existing users can easily migrate their production and experimental environments to the new version.

read more

New AWS Service Pats the Hand of the Standoffish

For its latest trick Amazon Web Services has launched CloudHSM so users – pointedly the enterprise – can up their data security and meet compliance requirements by using dedicated, tamper-resistant Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud.
The widgetry actually comes from SafeNet.
Amazon says the CloudHSM service lets customers securely generate, store and manage the cryptographic keys used for data encryption so they’re only accessible by the customer.

read more

SoftLayer Now Powers Online Games for More than 100 Million Players

In the hypercompetitive online gaming world a couple of milliseconds of lag can be the difference between virtual life and death, and the inability to scale up with demand can kill an entire game title. In the last two quarters, more than 60 new gaming companies have moved to SoftLayer’s global platform, frequently migrating from commodity cloud platforms because of problems with cost, latency, availability and raw performance.
Hundreds of the top mobile, PC and social games with more than 100 million active players, are now supported by SoftLayer’s infrastructure platform. With SoftLayer, gaming companies can roll out virtual and bare-metal servers along with a suite of networking, security and storage solutions on demand and in real time. This choice and agility allows games companies to have the capacity they need exactly when they need it.

read more

Virtualization Aids Health-Care Compliance

Associated Surgeons and Physicians, LLC in Indiana went from zero to 100 percent virtualized infrastructure and as a result, met many compliance and efficiency goals.
In part one of a two-part interview series, we discuss how a mid-market health services provider rapidly adopted server and client virtualization, and how that quickly lead to the ability to move to mobile, bring your own device (BYOD), and ultimately advanced disaster recovery (DR) benefits.
Associated Surgeons and Physicians found the right prescription for allowing users to designate and benefit from their own device choices, while also gaining an ability to better manage sensitive data and to create a data-protection lifecycle approach.

read more

Survey Says 40 Per Cent of IT Managers Have Suffered a Cloud Outage

According to a survey by Kelton done for TeamQuest, nearly four in ten respondents reported having suffered a cloud outage:

Many survey respondents believe the reported outages could have been prevented. Capacity management is sighted as one way to minimize the risks associated with cloud computing, according to respondents in a survey from Kelton Research, commissioned by TeamQuest Corporation.

Fears of cloud insecurity “should not drive infrastructure decisions”

Alert Logic’s latest cloud security report has summarised that cloud security providers (CSPs) are “inherently no less secure than enterprise data centres”, and that cloud security threats continue to follow a consistent pattern.

In its State of Cloud Security Report, subtitled “Targeted Attacks and Opportunistic Hacks”, the network security provider observed over 45,000 security incidents and found that some things don’t change; Web application attacks are the biggest threat for IT infrastructures.

The top three incident classes, for cloud hosting providers, were Web application attacks (52%), followed by brute force (30%) and vulnerability scans (27%). This compares interestingly with enterprise data centres, which saw malware and brute force as the number one incident class (49%).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, brute force accounted for the most frequent type of assault, given brute force hackers try a wide variety of combinations in order to get in.

Regardless, the overall conclusion was …

Red Hat Partners with Correlsense

Correlsense, a Massachusetts application management and IT monitoring ISV, is partnering with Red Hat around OpenShift, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
OpenShift customers and community will get access to SharePath, the Correlsense application performance management solution. Using OpenShift and SharePath together, developers and IT professionals should be able to manage applications from development through testing, deployment and production.
With SharePath, IT operations and development can use one tool to manage the performance of their applications after deployment.
SharePath is supposed to trace 100% of user transactions across multiple tiers and stacks, auto-detect interdependencies, and correlate the performance data on a single dashboard in real-time.

read more

VMware Crosses the Rubicon Redux

VMware’s (VMW) recent hybrid cloud announcement was both expected and yet provocative. It falls into a pattern of successful moves made in virtualization security and networking as the company to grow its addressable market by virtualizing servers and delivering increased IT agility, efficiency and economy. Yet the bold move is not without risk.
In 2009 I talked about how VMware, through acquisitions and engineering, entered the security space despite a robust virtualization security ecosystem (see VMware Crosses the Rubicon – March 2009). VMware was threatened then by the new security challenges being brought into the production data center by virtualization and the inability of its partners to move fast enough to address them.

read more