Among the hive of activity at Google I/O, one of the search giant’s more interesting announcements has come in the form of a general release of Google Compute Engine (GCE), giving developers increased access to Google infrastructure.

Google’s latest push is a further move into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, and culminates in the Silicon Valley company finding itself jockeying for position in a three horse race alongside Amazon and Microsoft.

Last month Microsoft ramped up its IaaS portfolio with the release of Infrastructure Services, enabling Windows Azure customers to migrate apps into the cloud, pricing it in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon, in comparison, announced later that week that its S3 cloud had broken the two trillion object mark – in other words, 20 objects for every person ever born on planet Earth.

So Google’s announcement was hotly anticipated. Yet anyone …

Compuware Corporation has announced the convergence of dynaTrace PurePath® Technology and the Gomez Performance Network, creating a powerful User Experience Management (UEM) solution. Compuware now offers a APMaaS solution that provides a complete UEM offering, including real-user, synthetic, third-party service monitoring and business impact analysis. Compuware’s APMaaS delivery model, auto-instrumentation and single-click to root cause diagnostics for both real user and synthetic transactions provides a deep and broad insight into application performance with a fast time-to-value.
Compuware APMaaS enables organizations to optimize user experience, manage performance, availability and service levels from a unified real-user and synthetic perspective, all within a single on-demand platform.

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Fancy that. Dell said Monday that its “current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the US in favor of best-in-class partner offerings” that it’ll deliver as a single-source supplier.
While it’s preaching the gospel of customer choice, it’s saving badly needed money in the guise of freedom from vendor lock-in and a single point of control.
It calls the concept the Cloud Partners Program. Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag have signed up. Dell expects to add more clouds and go beyond IaaS depending on customer reaction.

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“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as offerings such as Rackspace.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Terry Woloszyn: It’s actually both. Depending on the type of cloud – SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS, and whether it is private or public – the metrics that are used to determine the savings vary in weighting and importance. For example, the total cost of ownership in selecting, installing, configuring, managing, and ultimately replacing enterprise applications is quite large when compared to utilizing a public cloud SaaS equivalent. In this case, it’s about saving time and money. On the other hand, utilizing a private cloud infrastructure as a host platform for enterprise applications is much more about saving time in provisioning, as the money difference is small, realized only in hardware utilization and platform management cost savings.

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Cloud computing must have been brushing up on its bedside manner.
HIPAA requirements now stipulate everyone in the health-care industry must begin migrating patient records and other data to cloud computing. By 2015, all medical professionals with access to patient records must utilize electronic medical and health records (EMR and EHR), or face penalties.
A recent study by MarketsandMarkets revealed the health-care cloud computing market, which is only currently about 4% of the industry, is expected to grow to nearly $5.4 billion by 2017. The cloud migration process, however, can be daunting for health-care organizations since they have to move an incredible amount of data, according to an article on Forbes.com.
Cloud service providers are now offering a variety of new ways to access information via cloud applications and microsites designed for mobile devices. To specifically address the needs of the health-care industry, cloud service providers continue to improve technology platforms to improve lab order entry, pharmacy records management, medical billing, imaging service requests and more.

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Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst Ovum IT

Even today’s most successful organizations will not survive the converged business future by merely doing the same things they currently do only differently. What is needed is a shift to do different things.

Ovum believes that rapid, assured, and sustained business innovation is imperative to an organization’s success. IT leaders therefore need to effectively harness technological advances, cut time to market, and improve quality and performance.

Many organizations are facing significant changes in the application development process, particularly with intelligent computing now in nearly every piece of equipment shipped. This is driving the world toward environments that are becoming so complex that operations needs to be taken into consideration before the first line of code is written.

The need to build and deploy applications quickly is significantly blurring the traditional boundaries between development and operations. Ovum believes that the move to agile …

As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, serviceoriented delivery model possible.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Evangelism at WSO2, and Frank Rego, Business Development Manager at SUSE, will show how the combination of IaaS and PaaS enables enterprises to more efficiently and flexibly tackle the challenges of the modern connected enterprise.

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In some ways, everything about IT is about creating uniformity. Standard configurations. Synchronized patches. 1000 identical laptops shipped to all employees.

We place a high premium on «everything being exactly the same.»  And for good reason – if everything is the same, management and administration becomes far far easier.

And while we enjoy the fantasy of racks and racks of identically-configured servers humming away in the icy cold data centre of the future, anyone who knows what a data centre smells like (mmm, silicon) also knows that we can, at best, approximate that fantasy – but never truly taste it.

Why? Life is a big, hairy exception.

Exceptions for different workloads. Exceptions for supported software packages. Legacy systems where updates are either impossible or cost-prohibitive. New environments needed to support fun new applications and capabilities. Servers bought by enterprising LOB folks and stored under their desk until they were confiscated like gum …

Splunk, the real-time operational intelligence platform, and Cloudera, the Apache Hadoop player, have fashioned a strategic alliance to deliver Big Data analytics across the enterprise.

Splunk Enterprise can integrate with Cloudera’s Enterprise Hadoop distribution using Splunk’s Hadoop Connect, which provides bi-directional integration to move data between Splunk Enterprise and Hadoop. It’s supposed to let customers to use Splunk’s machine data ingestion and management to deliver data to Hadoop, or ingest data into Splunk from Hadoop, such as the output of Hadoop MapReduce jobs, then analyze and visualize the data.

Together they expect to attract a broader spectrum of end users.

SNAP Interactive is a joint customer of Splunk and Cloudera. It owns and operates AYI, one of the largest social dating applications on the Internet, with more than 20 million Facebook-connected profiles and more than a billion interest data points.

Splunk collects analytics data from all of its online systems so engineering and business users can do ad hoc analysis and visualize important trends. Splunk Hadoop Connect then sends data from Splunk to Cloudera for the specialized batch analytics that powers many features on Splunk’s site.

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