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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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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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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At pennies per virtual machine-hour, the economics of cloud computing are both compelling and daunting to replicate. Whether you are building your own cloud infrastructure, building a public cloud or choosing a cloud service, there are key strategy and technology decisions that make the difference between success and failure.

This session will share industry best practices for deploying cloud infrastructure that maximize the benefits of cloud economics, agility and interoperability. Learn how Intel is working with industry leaders to deliver open, secure and efficient cloud computing based on optimized compute, networking, storage and software technology and what are key tools and resources to help you achieve your cloud computing goals.

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Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how.

In this session Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the importance of knowing who SMBs are through market segmentation; understanding what cloud services they will consume; and understanding how best to sell to SMBs and from which channels.

Speaker Bio:
Manjula Talreja is Vice President Global Cloud Business Development for Cisco, where she is creating new business models and partnerships with technology vendors, SPs and SIs in cloud. In addition to her focus on key customers and partners, she is helping shape the next phase of Cisco’s enterprise cloud strategy. She is a highly sought-after industry thought-leader, and was recently named to CableFAX Magazine’s ‘Most Powerful Women in Cable 2012’.

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New, «Super-Sized» 4-Day Cloud Computing Bootcamp is a brief introduction to cloud computing carefully created and devised to help you keep up with evolving trends like Big Data, PaaS, APIs, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics. Solutions built around these topics require a sound cloud computing infrastructure to be successful while assisting customers harvest real benefits from this transformational change that is happening in the IT ecosystem.

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Google’s Compute Engine, its interpretation of Amazon Web Services’ EC2, is here, 11 months after it was announced and a little late to the party with Amazon.

It’s now available for anybody who’s interested, not just the chosen few.

To differentiate itself from AWS, Google’s widgetry will be sold by the minute, not the hour, with 10 minutes being the minimum. Figure less than two cents an hour.

Google says it’s also got:

Shared-core instances to provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads;

Advanced routing features to help users create gateways and VPN servers that enable them to build applications spanning their local network and Google’s cloud; and

Large persistent disks that support up to 10TB per volume, which, it chortles, translates into 10x the industry standard. It used to just support 1.25TB.

Google has been working on adding a PHP runtime and the new App Engine 1.8.0 includes a limited preview of the popular web programming widgetry. Google says it offers deep integration with other parts of Cloud Platform including Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage. App Engine already supports Java, Python and Google’s own Go language.

To make building modular application on App Engine easier, developers can now partition apps into components with separate scaling, deployments, versioning and performance settings.

Google is also rolling out a Cloud Datastore, a fully managed and schema-less solution for storing non-relational data based on App Engine High Replication Datastore, which reportedly serves 4.5 trillion transactions a month. It says it’s a standalone service that features automatic scalability and high availability as well as ACID transactions, SQL-like queries and indexes. It’s a direct competitor to Amazon’s S3.

Senior VP of technical infrastructure Urs Holzle blogged that with all the feature enhancements that have been made lately, Google Cloud Platform is seeing increased use, with “over three million applications and over 300,000 unique developers,” using it in a given month.

Apparently Google is counting on expanding its partnerships with Oracle, SAP and Red Hat to attract the enterprise folk.

See https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine.

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With over 3 million applications and over 300,000 unique developers now using Cloud Platform in a given month, according to Google Sr. VP Urs Hölzle, it is time to open that infrastructure «and make it available to any business or developer anywhere.»

Blogging in the Google Cloud Platform official blog, Hölzle wrote:

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