On June 12, 2012, between 6:20 – 7:05 pm, FortressITX CEO Jason Silverglate will host a technical presentation entitled “Leverage Cloud Technology to Power Your Office,” at the 10th International Cloud Expo in New York City. Consider this presentation your personal “how to” break down of what cloud computing can do for an office environment of any kind.
The presentation will cover the benefits of cloud computing for small business, cloud computing action points, best practices and examples of case studies proving the overall benefits of cloud computing in a corporate setting of any size. Silverglate will show business owners how incorporate hosted PBX, hosted exchange and hosted desktop (virtual desktop integration) technologies into everyday business practices to maximize company efficiency and minimize cost.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Major Trends Drive Call for Change in Data Strategies
The current landscape for data management, backup, and disaster recovery, too often ignores the transition from physical to virtualized environments, and sidesteps the heightened real-time role that data now plays in enterprise.
Businesses clearly need a better approach to their data recovery capabilities — across both their physical and virtualized environments. The current landscape for data management, backup, and disaster recovery (DR), too often ignores the transition from physical to virtualized environments, and sidesteps the heightened real-time role that data now plays in enterprise.
Easy Install of Cloudstack on Defunct Hardware for a Home Lab
To learn more about Cloud IaaS offerings, I painlessly setup Cloudstack, from Citrix, on two (outdated and defunct) DELL Optiplex 740 desktop computers.
Each desktop is configured with 8GB of memory and the processors are VT compatible (meaning they can run virtualization technology software – a hypervisor).
At first attempt, the Cloudstack software would not recognize the internal disk drives. Thinking that my old hardware would not run cloudstack, I researched the non-descript error and decided that the installer was not able to detect the disks because of the pre-existing software installed.
Windows Azure Offerings Are Expanded with New IaaS Offerings
Microsoft announced on June 7th that Windows Azure will be enhanced to include several infrastructure-as-a-service offerings including Windows Azure Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Web Sites and Media Services. These new offerings provide increased flexibility when planning your Private Cloud infrastructure through the introduction of Hybrid scenarios.
Windows Azure Virtual Machines provide the flexibility to inexpensively run Windows and Linux workloads with a variety of resource sizes (ie., Small, Medium, Large, XLarge VMs). In addition, the new Windows Azure Virtual Networking capabilities permit IT professionals to create secure site-to-site VPNs from their datacenters to the VMs they are running in the Azure cloud with no changes to underlying IP addressing. The resulting benefits provide the ability to quickly and securely extend your on-premises datacenter with elastic cloud resources while maintaining a single management toolset, Microsoft System Center, for managing both on-premises and cloud-based VM workloads. This flexibility is ideal for hybrid scenarios that involve the need for some application components to burst temporarily with additional compute resources or involve Internet-facing components that would otherwise be expensive and difficult for a business organization to host in-house.
Cloud Computing: Egenera Makes the Leap to Cloud Management
The way blade pioneer Egenera remembers things it invented converged infrastructure before it had to abandon its x86 BladeFrame servers, switches and storage for software based on its trusty Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager.
It is now making the obligatory move from other people’s virtualized blade servers to the private cloud still focused on blades.
Egenera has yet to make the great leap to rack servers. Blades, according to CEO Peter Manca, are more uniform and – although racks dominate – blades are faster growing.
Cloud Computing: Red Hat Recasts CloudForms as Hybrid Cloud Manager
Perhaps you will vaguely remember that a year ago CloudForms was supposed to be an infrastructure-as-a-service platform from Red Hat.
If you don’t it’s just as well because it’s not anymore.
It had to give way when Red Hat officially embraced OpenStack as an IaaS platform in April and became OpenStack’s single biggest contributor while it develops its own commercial OpenStack distribution.
That meant that Red Hat had to think up something else to do with CloudForms and so, when the widgetry hit GA Wednesday, it was recast as an open hybrid cloud management platform – largely, it appears, because it makes use of APIs in Deltacloud, the open source project Red Hat sent to live at Apache – that also happens to create hybrid IaaS resources in a corporate data center and on a public cloud like, say, Amazon or VMware
Cloud Cruiser Announces Availability of Cloud Cost Intelligence Solution
Cloud Cruiser’s new software products provide cost transparency, chargeback, and business intelligence analytics.
Cloud Cruiser announced at HP Discover in Las Vegas this week the general release of two new cloud cost intelligence solutions for HP CloudSystem.
The new software products integrate Cloud Cruiser’s cost analytics platform with HP CloudSystem Matrix, CloudSystem Enterprise, and Cloud Service Automation to provide cost transparency, chargeback, and business intelligence (BI) analytics for provisioned resources.
Guest post: Migrating applications to the cloud
8th June 2012
Security, compliance, and automation are top of the priority list for executives trying to plot their journey to the cloud. But how does one cut through all the ‘Cloud Clutter’ to identify key insights, trends, and prescriptive guidance for successfully migrate their current business applications to the cloud? Flexera Software’s Jeanne Morain explains.
Building Killer Apps with Big Data
One thing that gets lost in the general Big Data hubbub is the critical question of apps. Big Data can provide stunning business insights but unless those insights are embodied into an application that can galvanize new business behaviors they are not worth much.
VMware has been a thought leader in the area of cloud application platforms for some time. Now we are turning our attention to the intersection of Big Data and Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing – Is Everything Old Really New Again?
Service Providers large and small have been delivering network-based services for decades, including infrastructure and software. These have come in the form of enterprise hosting, unified communications, managed security, and managed applications. In fact, it’s not a stretch to include traditional telecommunications services such as Voice, MPLS, and Internet access into a discussion on traditional network services, since networks are shared. Over years of delivering these services, technological advances have taken place, many without interesting names or marketing budgets tied to them.
Enter the newest headline-grabbing network service – “Cloud.” It seems the market still has differing opinions on how to define Cloud. I have heard professionals blur the lines by referring to Cloud as anything in the network, or by lumping it in with services such as managed hosting. Purists call it self-service and unmanaged. There are even sub-categories, such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, where even the lines between these blur. Even though there isn’t consensus on the perfect definition of Cloud, there is agreement that something important is happening.Is the Cloud New?