Google’s Cloud Platform, which is supposed to have a million users and
lets users build applications and web sites, store and analyze data on its
infrastructure, has acquired a company called Talaria,
It’s supposed to let Googe run more software or support more users on fewer
servers without changing any code, which is, as they say, is a big deal for a
company with upwards of a million servers.
Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Software – IT Solutions, Ovum
The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is growing up. Vendors are endeavoring not only to help enterprises define, configure, and deploy increasingly complex applications, but also to abstract these applications from the underlying IaaS infrastructure. It is shifting from a bottom-up infrastructure-centric view to a top-down application-centric view.
This is happening in a variety of ways, including Ravello Systems’ Cloud Application Hypervisor (CAH), whose open beta launched in February 2013, the same month Ravello raised an additional $15m. Under its “Develop in the cloud, Deploy anywhere” tagline, Ravello is initially targeting the public cloud-based development and testing (dev/test) market.
More specifically, it is focusing on enterprises that wish to move existing as well as new applications to public clouds for dev/test purposes without having to make any changes to the applications. In its report entitled “On the radar: Ravello Systems”, Ovum explains …
by, Martin Saunders, Technical Director, Myhost.ie
Myhost.ie is an established, innovative hosting company based in the west of Ireland. We offer our customers reliable and affordable hosting solutions from personal blogs to busy ecommerce- driven websites.
We were looking for a robust and expansive solution to replace our shared hosting platform. We have used Parallels control panels since our inception. When we learnt about their latest offering Parallels Plesk Automation, we setup a test bed and began working with Parallels engineers directly to fix any problems that arose during testing, helping the product move into production.
We have been testing now for six months and went into production nearly two months ago. Our new customers are now using the platform and existing customer are being migrated over.
Our customers have been very happy with the new control panel, noticeable performance increase, and the new hosting features available to them.
The new Parallels Plesk Automation suite brings a new level of control and security to our hosting platform that helps us maintain our belief that ‘stuff should just work’.
“Without a doubt, cloud computing is making it more difficult to track data, which further complicates analyzing data,” noted David Reoch, Senior Director of Cloud Solutions at Gigamon, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “The enterprise is at a critical inflection point to settle on pervasive visibility solutions that ensure that data, no matter where it lives, can be analyzed and tracked by their existing and future tools.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
David Reoch: Completely AGREE. Cost savings are prevalent when legacy X86 hardware can be shut down in the enterprise data center, but without automation, moving a workload to the cloud just adds complexity to IT management systems. This is especially true when those management systems lack visibility for tools that cannot monitor the workload as it gets migrated to virtual or cloud infrastructure.
Late last Thursday a Reuters exclusive hit the wires saying IBM and EMC as well as other unidentified folks are talking acquisition with SoftLayer Technologies, the Dallas-based cloud and web hosting company founded in 2005. It said the price could be over $2 billion and that SoftLayer had hired Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.
Late Friday GigaOm waded in and said EMC isn’t really interested because now it’s got VMware’s newly announced Amazon rival and doesn’t have to buy one. A former IBM executive, however, said that Big Blue was interested – or had been at least a month ago but that it had also been kicking the tires at Rackspace.
Rackspace started OpenStack and IBM jumped into OpenStack big-time the week before last. SoftLayer is a member of OpenStack but not as deeply involved as either Rackspace or IBM.
GigaOm’s source said IBM isn’t very good at development and prefers to buy technology, integrate it and stick its brand on the widgetry.
No one is going to argue (at least not strongly) in favor of running business applications on an operating system that does not get security updates. Compliance teams will see this as a huge risk and will move heaven and earth to remediate it. In the next 12 months many IT departments around the world will be assembling WS2003 EOL SWAT teams to address this challenge. This will be like a mini Y2K forcing function for most enterprise IT departments.
IT departments hate end of life of products and the resulting headaches. End of life for a product means the support lifeline disappears, security updates stop and IT is left stranded with the compliance team breathing down their neck. Upgrade projects are not a fun sell to the business. “Hey, Ms./Mr. Business, let’s invest a bunch of money and time to get the same place you were before”… Gee, let’s get out the drill bit and do a root canal while we’re at it.
According to Google, the outage for some Google Drive users should be completely resolved.
Still having a problem? Then Google want to hear about it:
The problem with Google Drive should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better. If you are still experiencing an issue, please contact us via the Google Help Center.
In the face of explosive data growth and significant pressure on IT budgets, data centers cannot afford the application bottlenecks, stranded capacity, and excessive cost of traditional storage and networking architectures. They are leading the adoption of new flash storage and networking innovations with their unexpected TCO savings.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jamon Bowen, Technical Marketing Manager in the Accelerated Solutions Division of LSI Corporation, will discuss how an array of crucial technologies from “traditional” PCIeTM flash cards to transparent and intelligent caching, shared flash and storage pools, innovative data analytics acceleration and low-latency networking with in-line processing of data are enabling enterprises to dramatically increase datacenter work and efficiency while reducing overall costs.
From the Google App Status Dashboard:
March 18, 2013 7:17:00 AM PDT
We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly.
March 18, 2013 8:10:00 AM PDT
We’re aware of a problem with Google Drive affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Drive. We will provide an update by March 18, 2013 9:10:00 AM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.
March 18, 2013 8:55:00 AM PDT
Google Drive service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.
Enterprises can’t close their doors just because integration tools won’t cope with the volume of information that their systems produce. As each day goes by, their information will become larger and more complicated and enterprises must constantly struggle to manage the integration of dozens (or hundreds) of systems.
Apache Hadoop has quickly become the technology of choice for enterprises that need to perform complex analysis of petabytes of data, but few are aware of its potential to handle large-scale integration work. By using effective tools, integrators can process the complex transformation, synchronization, and orchestration tasks required in a high-performance, low cost, infinitely scalable way.