Hurricane Sandy brought with it a heavy dose of disaster, but utilizing the cloud helped mitigate what could have been even more difficulties faced by businesses.
“Overall, I think cloud does help,” said Stephanie Balaouras, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Tier one cloud and SaaS providers such as Google and Amazon operate their cloud services from multiple data centers and can simply shift workloads to other locations as needed. They are also able to deliver a level of availability that many organizations could never achieve themselves. This includes the resiliency of the data center infrastructure itself to the resources that they invest in high availability and disaster recovery capabilities,” Balaouras said, according to an article on SearchCloudSecurity.com.
“Cloud computing can absolutely help in BC/DR operations,” said Kevin O’Shea, information security practice lead at engineering, construction and technical services firm URS Corporation. “For example, we saw several large webhost providers switch to alternate locations when their primary data centers went offline in New York City. However, businesses must be organized in such a way as to be able to offload critical applications and data to a cloud provider,” he said.
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Cloud Computing: From Business Process Outsourcing to BpaaS
Over the last decade, Business Process Outsourcing has become an enterprise standard way of delegating the non-core processes to third-party service providers, which resulted in cost controls and business efficiency. This BPO industry has further matured by providing innovation to the outsourcing enterprise because specialized BPO providers with subject matter expertise on clients’ business vertical and business processes have ultimately enabled the enterprises to achieve their business goals beyond cost-cutting.
Cloud-based BPM is the provision of Business Process Management tools as a SaaS/PaaS over the network. These services provide the ability to orchestrate many low level of business services (again available as SaaS Services or by other On premise applications) coupled with human processes into a realization of complete Business Process As A Service (BpaaS).
Caringo Brings Object Storage to Apache CloudStack
Caringo, the object storage software folks, has announced the seamless integration of their CAStor core technology as an enterprise-ready object store for Apache CloudStack 4.0, the OpenStack-competitive project now in incubation with the Apache Software Foundation.
The integration means CAStor can provide secure multi-tenant storage that scales from terabytes to petabytes with a robust customizable level of some nines data durability without backup or RAID.
The integration has been submitted to Apache as part of the CloudStack 4.0 release and is available for immediate download.
Citrix’ CloudPlatform, powered by CloudStack, provides an open source platform for highly scalable and reliable cloud computing environments and is supposed to be deployed in some of the world’s largest enterprises.
Open Call to VMware – Commercialize Cloud Foundry Software!
After spending time at VMware and Cloud Expo last week, I believe that VMware’s lack of full backing for Cloud Foundry software is holding back the entire PaaS market in the enterprise.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of momentum in PaaS despite how very immature the market is. But this momentum is in pockets and largely outside of the core of software development in the enterprise. CloudFoundry.com might be moving along, but most enterprises don’t want to run the bulk of their applications in a public cloud. Only through the Cloud Foundry software layer will enterprises really be able to invest. And invest they will.
PaaS-based applications running in the enterprise data center are going to replace (or envelope) traditional app server-based approaches. It is just a matter of time due to productivity and support for cloud models. Cloud Foundry has the opportunity to be one of the winners but it won’t happen if VMware fails to put their weight behind it.
Quantum’s Got Big Data Storage
Quantum Tuesday introduced a new storage line based on next-generation
object storage technology geared to Big Data that challenges traditional
storage solutions.
The company, which has over 6,000 Big Data customer installations
worldwide, says conventional RAID drives aren’t up to handling large
datasets. They struggle with drive errors and long rebuild times. And
mirrored RAID is pricey.
Boring Cloud Could Be a Good Thing
Much of my writing on cloud computing over the past couple of years has been in near-panic mode. The US economy refused to bounce back, it seemed millions of jobs were lost forever, and the US seemed to be at the start of a long decline into obscurity.
Then hey, the United States might become the world’s largest oil producer in a few years! It might even be self-sufficient! This revelation alone should give the Obama administration some long-term breathing room and prod Congress to be a little more cooperative, on both sides of the aisle. Maybe not all hope is lost.
So perhaps we can now pause for a bit. Holiday season upon us, only a few weeks left in the year, and no time for radical transformation of enterprise IT or anything else. This year’s Cloud Expo in Silicon Valley has come and gone, with nothing truly earthshaking to report.
What’s going on? Well, OpenStack has gained steam, Cloudability says it can precisely monitor your Amazon AWS usage, Amazon itself has opened a new cloud center in Australia, and the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs is moving forward with Office 365 e-mail (delivered through HP Enterprise Services) for an initial 15,000 employees as part of the government’s Cloud First effort.
How Fast?
Cloud seems to be growing slowly, here and there, and is maybe in a bit of a boring stage right now. Boring can be good; it can signal stability. Cloud growth is hard to measure, as it’s hard to measure something you can’t define.
Holding that thought, Big Data was the big byword last year and this year, but the difficulty in defining it and complexity in deploying it is going to take many years. We’re still at the point of asking, “What does Big Data mean for you?”
Internet traffic is predicted to continue to grow rapidly, thereby putting more pressure on big datacenter operators to go green and to be cloudy.
For 2013, I expect to see continued growth for VMware and on-site virtualization. But I also expect to see the red herrings of security and sovereignty start to disappear as companies become more at east with devoting some of their IT to public cloud.
Should be great news for Rackspace, and perhaps Amazon, if the latter can stop those pesky outages. I’m still looking for my spigot, but I think we’re getting closer every year. Moore’s Law will continue to work its magic, and prices will become ever more attractive and delivery ever less granular.
Cloud Computing: MapR & Hadapt Offer Combined Hadoop Solution
MapR Technologies and Hadapt have cut a partnership so joint customers can combine the MapR Distribution for Hadoop with Hadapt’s Interactive Query capabilities to analyze all types of data – structured, semi-structured and unstructured – in a single enterprise platform without connectors, complexities or rigid structure.
Hadapt is the only data analytics platform natively integrating SQL with Apache Hadoop.
Hadapt marketing VP Scott Howser said, “We have already brought interactive applications on Hadoop to market and now, through this partnership with MapR, we are providing customers additional ease-of-use, performance and reliability advantages.”
Platfora Gets $20 Million Round
Platfora, the Big Data analytics start-up that just surfaced last month, has picked up a $20 million B round led by Battery Ventures with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, is also an investor in the company.
Platfora got a roughly $7.2 million A round a little over a year ago.
It will use the new money to expand sales and marketing and build out its product engineering and design team.
Platfora transforms raw data in Hadoop into scale-out, in-memory BI without recourse to a data warehouse. Non-technical business users can explore and analyze Big Data through a web-based interface. It uses HTML5 canvas technology for collaborative data analysis across any device or platform.
Commercializing the Cloud
A cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers.
Why cloud services for your consulting and business customers now? Have they been asking for it
Certainly, the customers are the big driver while we are moving into cloud services. Being a traditional IT integrator, we’ve been very successful showing a lot of data-center solutions to our customers, but more and more we’re seeing customers finding it harder to get CAPEX and new projects and they are really starting to look at the cloud alternative.
Oracle Buys into Engine Yard, Integration to Follow
Oracle has made a strategic minority investment in Engine Yard, the Platform-as-a-Service company with the cloud development platform that supports the Ruby, PHP and Node.js development languages.
The exact sum, position and valuation went unmentioned. Engine Yard will continue to operate as an independent company.
Ironically Amazon was part of a $15 million B round in 2008 and a $19 C round in 2009. Prior to the Oracle, Engine Yard is understood to have raised $37.5 million.
The investment means that Oracle and Engine Yard will connect their respective PaaS offerings to enable more rapid development of applications in a secure, reliable and scalable environment. Developers are supposed to be able to extend their packaged applications more efficiently to support additional business requirements and test, prototype and deploy new purpose-built apps without having to assemble and maintain the infrastructure.