Oracle’s Larry Ellison once called cloud computing “Complete gibberish” but now Oracle is fully in the Cloud game with new announcements, which BusinessInsider covered in a story over the weekend.
There are two versions of Oracle’s new IaaS cloud. One is a “public cloud” similar to the kind of clouds offered by Amazon, Rackspace, HP, and others, where the hardware is located in Oracle’s data centers. It includes compute services and storage services, Ellison said.
The second is the so-called Oracle Private cloud, where a replica of Oracle’s public cloud is put in the customer’s own data center. Oracle would still own the hardware and be responsible for running it, securing it and updating it
Choosing how to build a cloud is perhaps the biggest strategic decision IT leaders will make this decade. It will determine their organizational competitiveness, flexibility, and IT economics.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Gordon Haff, Cloud Evangelist at Red Hat, will discuss the evolution of cloud computing and the options you have to build a cloud. He will also detail an open source approach to cloud computing that includes open standards, choice of infrastructure, and portability.
About a decade ago, researchers began to study the performance of e-government portals in order to identify best practices. Studies have also focused on identifying the factors that influence the information quality these portals offer to the public. Most of these studies consider only portal outputs, but ignore the resources (or inputs) used to develop and maintain the portal. This is a problem, because when you analyze only the outputs of a system you are only seeing half of the performance picture. In other words, you are only measuring effectiveness and ignoring efficiency. In an era of ever-tightening government budgets, we simply cannot afford to ignore efficiency in government services. Naturally then the question is: how do you measure the efficiency of e-government portals?
The answer lies is a little known type of analysis called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Once viewed as tool only for serious economists, DEA has experienced an incredible surge in popularity in measuring the efficiency of systems, business units, and processes across dozens of business sectors. In fact, a quick search of Google Scholar yields thousands of published applications of DEA for this very purpose. While the details of DEA are beyond the scope of any blog post, I can provide you with the main idea of DEA and the challenges of trying to measure efficiency without it.
Back in the day when virtualization and cloud were just making waves, one of the first challenges made obvious was managing IP addresses. As VM density increased, there were more IP network management tasks that had to be handled – from distributing and assigning IP addresses to VLAN configuration to DNS entries.
All this had to be done manually. It was recognized there was a growing gap between the ability of operations to handle the volatility in the IP network due to virtualization and cloud, but very little was done to address it. One of the forerunners of automation in the IP management space was Infoblox. Only we didn’t call it “automation” then, we called it “Infrastructure 2.0”.
After initially focusing on managing the internal volatility in the IP network, the increase in architectures adopting a hyper-hybrid cloud model are turning that focus outward, toward the need to more efficiently manage the global IP network space.
I gave a talk titled Big Data – Trends and Challenges on Sept 27 in San Jose. This was organized as a meet-up event by Datapipe and Compassites Software. Datapipe provides cloud infrastructure services to clients whereas Compassites Software (where I am a board director) is a technology services firm out of … Continue reading →
The days of the old-style triple or quad-play bundles are numbered. Going forward, operators will have to offer a whole range of new content and applications within their bundled products – including OTT content from companies like Netflix and Spotify and even VoIP from providers like Skype – to keep their subscribers happy.
A report from Informa T&M, Beyond Quad-Play: How Multi-Screen, OTT and the Cloud Are Transforming Next-Generation Bundling, takes a global snapshot of the fast-changing bundling market and shows how operators across the global market are offering new services and applications to bring more value to their bundled products.
