Metacloud plays hardball.
It has no patience with pilots or proofs-of-concept. It’ll only do production Infrastructure-as-a-Service installations, which is kind of uppity for a start-up that only hit the radar last October – even if it did come out of the closet with an unidentified Fortune 100 reportedly under contract.
It didn’t even have a name for its OpenStack distribution until now. It’s calling the private cloud it’s built on the latest Grizzly version of OpenStack Carbon|OS.
See, Metacloud’s founders are pretty sure of themselves because they figure they’ve done this kind of thing before. When CEO Steve Curry was at Yahoo for over a decade he managed its global storage operations that handled hundreds of petabytes of content and user data. And when CTO Sean Lynch was at Ticketmaster, the third-largest e-commerce system in the world, he ran its technical operations.
The company claims its operational experience is “a unique asset, found nowhere else in the private cloud services sector today.”

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In the course of IT history, many schemes have been devised and deployed to protect data against storage system failure, especially disk drive hardware. These protection mechanisms have nearly always been variants on two themes: duplication of files or objects (backup, archiving, synchronization, remote replication come to mind); or parity-based schemes at disk level (RAID) or at object level (erasure coding, often also referred to as Reed-Solomon coding). Regardless of implementation details, the latter always consists of the computation and storage of “parity” information over a number of data entities (whether disks, blocks or objects). Many different parity schemes exist, offering a wide range of protection trade-offs between capacity overhead and protection level – hence their interest.

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Despite the great interest in SaaS and cloud, many large enterprises are still grappling with the right mixture of on-premises, hosted and various cloud deployment models for their applications, infrastructure and data. And the formula for picking which apps and assets should run where will be a changing one, as business goals, economic pressures and technology advances all conspire to make last year’s IT model obsolete. Ongoing.applications, infrastructure and data. And the formula for picking which apps and assets should run where will be a changing one, as business goals, economic pressures and technology advances all conspire to make last year’s IT model obsolete. Ongoing.

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Red Hat made its power play Wednesday. One it’s been itching to make for a couple of years. One that it hopes will ultimately jam a stick through the spokes of VMware’s front wheel. And to make sure that happens it’ll be telling everybody who’ll listen that its widgetry is a third the price of VMware’s vCloud.
This is where Red Hat gets to play a card that only Microsoft can match – its operating system, commonly known as RHEL – and create a tightly integrated cloud platform by fusing RHEL with OpenStack, the open source cloud computing software.
The move came as a one-two punch consisting of a kit called the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and another called Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure that deliver the company’s essential vision of an Open Hybrid Cloud.

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Cloud computing is the game changer for the life sciences industry, according to an article on PharmaBiz.com.
Globally, pharma majors are deploying cloud technology because it provides data security, compliance and transparency, according to Vikram Anand, associate vice president, cloud-based technology & product delivery services, ArisGlobal.
“Cloud is changing the way we deploy technology. Eli Lily uses cloud services for research and development efforts. GSK has chosen to replace its existing Lotus Notes, Domino, and Postini services for its 96,500 employees worldwide, with everything being hosted on the cloud. Roche uses pre-clinical SaaS solution to consolidate several key application areas and harmonize all its sites worldwide,” he said.
The benefits of moving to the cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with “pay-as-you-go” pricing. It allows enhanced collaboration, lower upfront investment, provides increased return on investment and greater flexibility and faster scale up of operations.
Cloud computing drastically lowers the total cost of ownership, improves collaboration, operational efficiency and speeds up the R&D processes. Security of data on the cloud is better than in-house systems. Data on the cloud is secure and compliant, Anand added.

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Legacy apps are surely the albatross of the modern cloud-enabled IT department – you put them there, and now you have to live with them.

Short of scrapping millions of dollars of worth of investments, something needs to be done with these apps, especially when cloud adoption is altering the efficiency and cost landscape for IT.
The first thing is to consider is why the move needs to take place. The reality for most companies is that there is a finite amount of space they can utilize in the data center. Companies have certain apps that they want to run locally, which is often the most mission critical aspects of their business. If its healthcare that’s EMR, if tis retail that’s the point of sale platform. These applications need as low latency as possible since there will always be someone in the organization that’s doing something very important and needs that data as quickly as possible.

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Conspiracy theorists and other concerned citizens will insist the government is watching every keystroke, keeping a record of every website, transaction, text and email. Shades of 1984’s Big Brother, right?

These last few weeks, the news has been brimming with revelations of data surveillance and monitoring by the government (not to mention data harvesting corporations like Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc…). Everyone is sensitive as to what is being looked at, stored, and analyzed for hazily defined purposes. Privacy is no longer as private as you think; and hasn’t been for many years.

Politics, ethics and debates over 4th amendment interpretation aside (as they serve no useful purpose in this analysis), a question was asked on one the security forums that in light of these alleged breaches of trust, whether cloud security-and more specifically, identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) is still a feasible and trustworthy option?

Short answer: of course it is …

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report examining why the CIA chose Amazon ahead of IBM for its recent $600m private cloud contract, and whether IBM has a case to answer with its protests against the decision.

And the conclusion it came to was, to quote The Simpsons, a little from column A and a little from column B. The GAO both sustained and rejected IBM’s complaint in part, and surmised that Amazon’s offer was both “the best value” and a “superior technical solution”.

This comes despite Amazon’s proposal being over $50m a year more expensive – the bean counters found that Amazon would cost $148m annually, as opposed to IBM’s $94m.

In terms of technical specs, the two vendors were put side by side, with Amazon coming out on top. The CIA found that Amazon’s SLA, technical approach and past performance was superior …

Some of our customers and billing industry contacts are somewhat intrigued (or even bemused) by the upsurge in attention being given to the concept of “subscriptions”. Some are concerned that they’re missing something because, after all, subscriptions have been business-as-usual for most of us for years. So why all the fuss? Does the growth of subscription-type services delivered over the Internet indicate there’s some exciting new business model out there? Are we seeing fundamental changes in the way companies are doing business?
Part of the mythology surrounding subscription services is that there is something fresh and new about this, something that needs a new generation of billing systems optimized for subscriptions. This is puzzling. Subscription services have been around on the Internet since its earliest days. Actually, subscription services in various forms existed decades before the Internet appeared to change our lives. True, the Internet has opened up huge additional opportunities for subscription services, just as it has opened up all sorts of other opportunities – for content distribution, selling products, communicating, and more. In one way or another, we managed to do most of these things in the dark pre-Internet days, but the Internet had truly transformed the scale, reach and cost factors underpinning all of these business activities.

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I don’t see any way to interpret the NSA mess as strengthening the United States.

For our research at the Tau Institute, this means we need to take a look at the Press Freedom Index (PFI) and possibly integrate it (and possibly other measures) into our algorithms and rankings, because I don’t see how a US that appears to be substantially less unfree than we all thought can be analyzed in the same light as before.

This will be a semi-complex, semi-tedious process. The factors we integrate into our research are derived and reported in diverse ways. Our challenge is to create a composite index that weighs them rationally. Integrating the PFI will be no different.

Good-bye, America
Whether terrorist attacks have truly been prevented – and could have been prevented only with the known and still unknown NSA programs – the reality is that the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution has been shredded by the current and prior administrations.

I think the Third Amendment also came close to violation during the recent police/military shutdown of Boston, and I eagerly await the day for some insane Member of Congress (say, Sen. Diane Feinstein or Rep. Pete King) to start huffing and puffing about how the Fifth Amendment protects terrorists and weakens America.

Additionally, President Obama has been no friend of the First Amendment almost from the day he took office and started chirping at his media critics. Millions of Americans are convinced that he’s also a sworn enemy of the Second Amendment.

Taking a further look, it’s clear that the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth came under assault under the previous administration, and remain under duress. All this implies violations of the Ninth, and the Tenth looks like a quaint historical footnote.

That’s it. 10 for 10. The Bill of Rights are now as relevant as the Code of Hammurabi. James Madison weeps somewhere, as should we all. In the absence of enormous electoral outrage – and candidates to match – in 2014 and 2016, say good-bye to the United States of America as constituted in 1789.

So It’s Time to Update
I’m taking all this into account as I work with my colleagues to update our research at the Tau Institute. Operating from offices on a semi-restored college campus in Northern Illinois this past year, I’ve had some useful input from economists, mathematicians, and computer scientists as to how the factors we integrate into our Tau Index are weighted and interact.

You can google “Strukhoff Tau” or visit my personal website at www.rogerstrukhoff.sys-con.com to find the dozens of articles I’ve written about the research.

We are seeking to create a level playing field when examining the IT environments of 100+ countries. We mix in economic and social factors, as they impact how effective IT can be.

Our algorithms look at a number of publicly available measures – GDP, per capita income, cost of living, Gini coefficient, average bandwidth, broadband access, data servers, perception of corruption, and human development – to create an overall ranking as well as regional rankings and rankings by income tier.

We don’t weigh the factors in a traditional way – for example, by simply assigning a percentage of weight to each factor. The world is not really flat, and there are very few straightline measures that give an accurate picture of what’s going on in any particular country or region. Rather, I see a series of curves, slopes, and trajectories in how things work, and how they should be measured.

As an example, the Gini coefficient, which measures income disparity, is not plotted on a straight line, but on something called a Lorenz curve. Another example: The United Nations Human Development Index appears at first glance to be plotted on a straight line between 0 and 1, but its derivation includes several inputs, normalizations, logs, and geometric contortions along the way. These are just two examples.

So we use fractional exponents to create “curves of influence” that weigh the various factors on a relative basis. The perceptions of corruption index (PCI), for example, published by Transparency International, carries more weight in less developed countries than developed countries.

According to our calculations, it adds only 4.8% of the weight to Estonia, a country that does great overall but which could still lessen its corruption. It carries 10.7% of the weight in high-performing, un-corrupt Finland, but 20.2% of the weight in middling, corrupt Mexico.

As we project this factor on a curve, Mexico would improve its ranking with a better PCI, and the relative weight of the PCI would decline.

I’m happy to discuss all this with you at any time, and go into real depth about our numbers and how we derive them.

Something to Think About
Our preliminary work shows that if we were to integrate the Press Freedom Index into the mix, the United States’s overall ranking would not decline precipitously, primarily because the US is already a middling performer in our rankings. But it would lose more ground to Canada and many other developed nations that it already trails.

Meanwhile, Canada is already trying to lure educated technologists by offering a full citizenship program rather than the ludicrous indentured servitude of the US’s H-1B visa. Another country in the Americas, Chile (which already ranks higher than the US in our index and has a better perception of corruption), is encouraging technology startup through a direct government program.

Our research focuses on finding global leaders across regions and income tiers, identifying diamonds in the rough, and helping the laggards improve their situation. We are unbiased and agnostic when it comes to who “should” or should not lead. We have an additional office in Metro Manila and advisors from around the world.

The NSA revelations may not ultimately earn the wrath of the majority of the American people. If this turns out to be the case, then the future of the US will be even bleaker than it appears today.

Our data already shows that the United States is far from exceptional in our rankings, and I believe with all my heart that the verifiable Orwellian reality of the country today, if it does not change, will be its ruin, and our data will show this in the long term.

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