Rackspace has slashed the price of its cloud bandwidth and content delivery network (CDN) services by 33%. It’s also implementing tiered pricing for its OpenStack products, starting with Cloud Files, its object storage service.
Most of the new pricing will kick in over the next few weeks.
The bulk of Rackspace’s revenues still come from hosting. In its last quarter its cloud sales, which compete with Amazon’s, were up 49% year-over-year to $87.3 million. As good as that might sound for the last five quarters its cloud sales have been on a downward trajectory. For instance, year-over-year cloud revenue rose 69% in Q2 but only 57% in Q3.
The Wall Street Journal concluded that the company isn’t delivering on its high valuation. Its growth depends on how quickly its OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service is adopted.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Do You Know the Top Threats to Cloud Security?
Where computing goes, trouble follows — in the form of hackers, disgruntled employees, and plain old destructive bugs. And as computing is moving to the Cloud (it says so right there in our logo!) that’s where some of the newest threats are emerging.
The Cloud Security Alliance has identified The Notorious Nine, (registration required) the top nine cloud computing threats for 2013.
Data breaches, data loss, account and traffic hijacking, insecure interfaces and APIs, denial of service attacks, malicious insiders, cloud “abuse” (using the power of the cloud to crack passwords), lack of due diligence, and shared technology platforms leading to shared vulnerabilities.
New PCI DSS Cloud Computing Guidelines – Are You Compliant?
This month the Cloud SIG of the PCI Security Standards Council released supplemental guidelines covering cloud computing. We’re happy to see APIs included as a recognized attack surface. As this document makes clear, responsibility for compliance for cloud-hosted data and services is shared between the client and the provider. API providers moving to the cloud should pay close attention to this document: Section 6.5.5 covers Security of Interfaces and APIs, while Appendix D covers implementation considerations that include API-related topics. For cloud-hosted systems, an API gateway can simplify implementation, secure PII and PAN data in motion, provide compliance and ensure auditability in these areas.
Rackspace Acquires DBaaS Provider ObjectRocket
“Databases are the core of any application and expertise in the most popular database technologies will be critical to us delivering Fanatical Support in the open cloud,” said Pat Matthews, SVP of corporate development at Rackspace Hosting, as it was announced that Rackspace has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ObjectRocket, a MongoDB database as a service (DBaaS) provider.
Personal Cloud Usage Influences Company Adoption: CDW
As you go, so goes your company. At least in terms of which cloud apps you use that find their way into the workplace.
Showing that work imitates life, a CDW report surveyed 1,242 IT professionals and found that a major driver of corporate cloud adoption is users’ experiences of consumer services.
Nearly three quarters of respondents (73%) claimed that, in their company, employees’ use of personal cloud apps has “significantly influenced” the decision to move wholesale to the cloud. Similarly, just over three in five (61%) cloud-using organizations agreed that employee personal devices have culminated in a faster move to the cloud, according to an article on CloudComputingNews.net.
It’s also the case with IT professionals – two-thirds agreed that their personal use of cloud has influenced the company in terms of adoption.
Another aspect of the CDW research was a detailed look at the infrastructure being moved over to cloud on a company-by-company basis. Storage software was the most frequently cited service moved to the cloud by SMBs (40% small businesses, 35% medium businesses), while conferencing and collaboration tools were the most popular for large organizations (40%).
CIOs: Ready or Not, Here Comes the Cloud
For several years now, prognosticators have insisted that cloud computing would take over the enterprise. And, for several years, we’ve seen growing adoption of cloud computing technologies, but nothing to indicate massive acceptance.
A recent study from Brocade, however, suggests that that phenomenon is about to change. Here are some of the most interesting statistics to come from the CIO survey, which included 100 CIOs from around the world:
A third of CIOs report that they’re already implementing cloud computing. Interestingly enough, this adoption of cloud technology has rarely come as a result of a push from IT. It’s been demand from business units, rather than a move from the center outward.
From ESBs to API Portals, an Evolutionary Journey | Part 1
A number of analysts are beginning to suggest 2013 will likely signal the awakening of a long night in the IT industry that started with the beginning of the third millennium with the Internet crash. And just as recovery was around the corner, the financial crisis of 2008 dried the IT well once more. Both crises can be characterized as crises of demand. Just past 2000, the Y2K pipeline ran dry. Some argue that the problem was overstated, whereas others argue that the problem was solved just in time. In either case this event triggered a significant pullback in IT spending.
Faced with an existential threat after Y2K, the IT industry did not sit still. The main outcome from these lean years has been a significant increase in efficiency where the role of IT in companies with most advanced practices shifted from being a cost center to an active participant in the execution of corporate business strategy. Capabilities evolved from no accountability on resource utilization to efficient use of capital to nimble participant in a broad range of organizations and initiatives. The second crisis reaffirmed the continuing need to do more in the face of shrinking budgets and very likely provided the impetus for the widespread adoption of cloud technology.
From ESBs to API Portals, an Evolutionary Journey | Part 1
A number of analysts are beginning to suggest 2013 will likely signal the awakening of a long night in the IT industry that started with the beginning of the third millennium with the Internet crash. And just as recovery was around the corner, the financial crisis of 2008 dried the IT well once more. Both crises can be characterized as crises of demand. Just past 2000, the Y2K pipeline ran dry. Some argue that the problem was overstated, whereas others argue that the problem was solved just in time. In either case this event triggered a significant pullback in IT spending.
Faced with an existential threat after Y2K, the IT industry did not sit still. The main outcome from these lean years has been a significant increase in efficiency where the role of IT in companies with most advanced practices shifted from being a cost center to an active participant in the execution of corporate business strategy. Capabilities evolved from no accountability on resource utilization to efficient use of capital to nimble participant in a broad range of organizations and initiatives. The second crisis reaffirmed the continuing need to do more in the face of shrinking budgets and very likely provided the impetus for the widespread adoption of cloud technology.
Baidu Commercializes First ARM Servers for Cloud
Baidu, which is often called the Google of China, has apparently won the race to become the first company to deploy servers based on ARM smartphone chips in a “large-scale” production environment in its data center.
It’s using a custom version of Marvell’s low-power 32-bit quad-core Armada XP CPU Server-on-a-Chip (SOC) in a personal cloud storage system called Baidu Cloud or Baidu Pan.
It’s unclear whether any other kind of server is being used to deliver the service.
The boxes themselves, called “easy-to-integrate,” were run up by an unidentified Asian ODM.
Marvell, like the other dozen or so ARM fabricators, is hoping to eventually challenge industry-standard x86 servers, a situation Intel would rather avoid. ARM has forced Intel to try to cut its inefficient power consumption.
Alcatel-Lucent, GigaSpaces Partner for Delivery of Carrier Cloud PaaS
Guest post by Adi Paz, Executive VP, Marketing and Business Development, GigaSpaces
GigaSpaces Cloudify solution enables the on-boarding of applications onto any cloud. For several months now, GigaSpaces has been working with Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) on the use of Cloudify in a carrier cloud service environment. Together with Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand™ solution, Cloudify is a fundamental building block in the technological backbone of ALU’s carrier-grade Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS).
Dor Skuler, Vice President & General Manager of the CloudBand Business Unit at Alcatel-Lucent, has said that, “Offering CPaaS as part of the CloudBand solution enables service providers to make a smooth migration to the carrier cloud and quickly deploy value-added services with improved quality and scalability, without the need for dedicated equipment.”
This new class of carrier cloud services brings the benefits of the cloud to the carrier environment without sacrificing security, reliability and/or quality of applications. The CPaaS enables the on-boarding of mission-critical applications on a massive scale, including both legacy and new carrier cloud services. This is a factor in meeting the requirements of many customers’ Service Level Agreements (SLAs) by integrating carrier networks.
Unlike regular cloud environments, where an application needs to explicitly handle multi-zone deployments, CPaaS enables the application workload and availability to be handled through a policy driven approach. The policy describes the desired application SLA, while the carrier CPaaS maps the deployment of the application resources to the cloud and reflects the best latency, load, or availability requirements.
Additionally, the integration will enable the creation of network-aware CPaaS services, simplified on-boarding to ALU’s CloudBand platform, multi-site app deployment and simplification of management of a number of latency and location-sensitive applications. The ability to comply with five-nine reliability, security, and disaster recovery requirements ensures peace-of-mind for enterprises choosing to on-board mission-critical applications to the carrier network.
The Cloudify Approach
Cloudify manages applications at the process level, and as such uses the same underlying architecture for any application regardless of the language or the technology stack that comprises the application. That said, working at the process level is often not enough, because not all processes are made the same. For example, databases behave quite differently from web containers and load-balancers. In order for us to still get in-depth knowledge about the managed application’s processes, Cloudify uses a recipe-based approach. The recipe-based approach enables us to describe the elements that are specific to that individual process, such as the configuration element, the dependency on other processes, the specific key performance indicators that tell if that process’ behavior is aligned with its SLA, and so on.
Working on the process level makes it possible to plug into a large variety of infrastructures, whether they happen to be public, private, or bare-metal environments. Cloudify uses an abstraction layer known as the Cloud Driver that interfaces with the cloud infrastructure to provide on-demand compute resources for running applications.
The Cloudify process can be implemented be done on individual clouds from HP, Microsoft, IBM, CloudStack, etc., or in the carrier network infrastructure of a company like Alcatel-Lucent.
Adi Paz is responsible for developing and communicating GigaSpaces’ strategy, and managing the company’s go-to-market activities and strategic alliances.