Cloud computing, powered by open source technology, is driving enterprise adoption. This leads to better business case viability to transform IT through innovative initiatives.
At the recent Red Hat summit in Boston the company took the unusual step of combining financial analysts and industry analysts in the same meeting. It was interesting to see CFO Charles E. Peters Jr. on stage dressed in Wall Street attire talking financials, and CEO Jim Whitehurst in jeans and red shoes talking strategy. Very few large enterprises have similar diversity among top executives, showing a unique corporate culture at Red Hat.

Whitehurst presented Red Hat’s three top priorities: increasing revenues, community development and decreasing costs. It was a refreshing change from other technology vendors who seem primarily focused on cost cutting. Focusing on the community provides Red Hat a unique opportunity to «crowd source» innovation with active participation of customers & partners in the product development process. This approach also benefits customers, assuring them that they have an influence when product features are prioritized.

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An OpenStack contingent has set up an ARM-based cloud as a zone in TryStack.org, the free five-month-old sandbox, for trying and testing the OpenStack IaaS platform that’s been limited to just an x86 zone running industry-standard hardware up until now.
It’s believed to be the first ARM-based cloud or at least the first OpenStack cloud on ARM. It’s not meant for production use.
The widgetry consists of HP Redstone servers fitted with Calxeda’s ECX-1000 ARM chips running Essex, the latest version of OpenStack, and Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS hosted by Texas service provider Core NAP.

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“We just announced version 2 of AppStack this week and we added another capability – application marketplace,” noted John Yung, CEO of Appcara, in this SYS-CON.TV interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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A few months ago, I reckoned that 2012 was Year One for the cloud. My logic was that most writers, analysts, and marketers get over-excited early on by technology developments and trends, so that when said development or trend truly arrives it seems to disappoint.

I guess my thought was similar to that wretched Gartner hypecycle, except without the fine analytics and other big science involved.

Mostly, I didn’t want people to think we’re in a lull, now that the original excitement has worn off, when in fact we’re in the midst of a very exciting year for cloud computing. These past few days have shown this to be true.

First, let’s not overlook Rightscale’s latest development, a new integration with Google’s new Compute Engine. Santa Barbara’s “Cloud Blue” is running this program in beta for now, an expected tactic given that “GCE” is only a few days old. Rightscale has emerged as one of the top two (and perhaps the top) company in the field of cloud management, and is a key driver to what it calls multi-cloud development. To me, multi-cloud means real-world cloud.

Compute Engine itself was a huuuge announcement, as it appears it will provide competition of the highest order to Amazon Web Services when it comes to offsite, outsourced, third-party, please-call-it-anything-but-public cloud.

But that’s so last week. The latest news comes out of the Boston area, with news of an executive shuffle and rumored spin-offs at VMware. The shuffle puts Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger – one of the good guys of the industry – in charge of VMware, presumably charged with restoring more of an iron grip on the virtualization market (impossible) and continuing to move the company upstack (more possible). Former VMware CEO Paul Maritz moves onto the EMC mother ship as a maybe, could-be successor to CEO Joe Tucci when he retires 20 years from now.

The bigger news for cloud is the alleged spin-off of the CloudFoundry PaaS platform. The company will be an independent brand, I guess, yet still integrated into EMC.

What’s really happening here is EMC – dissatisfied with being thought of as a mere storage company, yet unwilling to sully its dominant storage brand – building a vertically integrated IT products and services company that wants to compete directly with IBM, HP, and Oracle. The company’s sitting on $6 billion in cash, not a lot when compared to HP ($8b), IBM ($12b), Oracle ($30b), and Microsoft ($52b). Tough to see how it will do so in the short term.

I’ve heard ritual talk of the consolidations to come in cloud computing, but it seems we’re far from that. Companies are being acquired here and there, but the bigger story is what’s being rolled out. Speaking of which, let’s keep our eyes on Redmond and see if any love will be given to Hyper-V and if Windows 8 will revive Microsoft as a mobile player, and by extension, as a cloud-computing leader.

Year One is shaping up to be an exciting year.

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Console, enabling IT organizations to optimize capacity decisions, VM placements and resource allocations for AIX-based IBM PowerVM environments. This latest version allows customers to leverage the same technology they use to optimize VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments to manage virtualized AIX infrastructure.
According to Andrew Hillier, CiRBA CTO and co-founder, “It becomes an analytics challenge, and the key is to strike the optimal balance of efficiency and risk given the infrastructure capabilities, the requirements of the workloads being hosted, and the policies governing the relationship between the two.”

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Cloud computing is gaining more and more traction across enterprises and SMB organizations. Its many benefits and cost structure provide an attractive alternative to the traditional data center, but at the same time cloud data security, cloud encryption and cloud key management remains top concerns. Thought leaders and analysts agree that cloud data encryption is a fundamental first step. But when looking at the fine print, a more complicated situation is revealed.
We commonly identify 3 approaches to cloud key management; all have their pros and cons. The first approach is to use the encryption as provided by your cloud provider, the pros are obvious – it’s easy to deploy and manage and it transparently integrates with your cloud data layer – but the cost is high – you trust your cloud provider with what should be your best kept secret – your encryption keys. Data security expert Rich Mogul had described it well on his blog. The second approach is to trust a third party with your encryption keys. This approach eliminates some cloud flexibility advantages as encryption is no longer integrated to your cloud, and still carries the same risks as before – you trust a third party with your keys. The third approach involves implementing a key management server back in the physical data center. While this approach is indeed secure, it eliminates many cloud advantages, and forces you back to your data center, when what you wanted is to migrate to the cloud.

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Last week one news item that attracted media attention was the hacking of some nearly 450,000 passwords from Yahoo Service called ‘Yahoo Voice’. The communications on the incident state that, SQL Injection is the primary technique adopted by hackers to get the information out of databases and publish them.
As per further communications, we find the affected company taking more precautions to ensure that security is their highest priority. These events will also generally shake the Cloud Adoption at the enterprise level, where always the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the minds of CIOs may increase due to these incidents.
However the following are the best practices and guidelines that should be adopted by any enterprise when adopting hybrid cloud computing and a one-off incident should not dampen their road map to hybrid computing adoption.

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With Microsoft’s announcements at this year’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), it is evident that change is coming to all enterprise software resellers. To better prepare for the inevitable transition to the cloud, here is an infographic that provides an overview of what it was like to sell an on-premise solution compared to what it will be like to sell «in the cloud».

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Rackspace Hosting on Wednesday announced that it has upgraded its Cloud Tools Marketplace to enhance the customer experience for accessing the ecosystem of cutting-edge applications, tools and solutions.
John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, noted that «the Cloud Tools Marketplace provides an ideal customer experience by making it easier for them to identify the most appropriate technologies to use with their open cloud deployment.»
Through the Cloud Tools Marketplace, developers and enterprise IT professionals building on the open Rackspace Cloud, as well as first generation Cloud Servers, can evaluate more than one hundred industry leading technologies to deliver advanced capabilities for their environments hosted at Rackspace.

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This white paper examines how you can maximize the value of your mainframe applications, and highlights the most cost-effective and pragmatic ways to improve your ROI.
Learn how Micro Focus are revolutionizing the way mainframe applications are developed, modernized and tested in order to significantly benefit your business.

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