Eucalyptus is known in the cloud arena as being an open source offering that gives private cloud engineers the tools they need work seamlessly with Amazon Web Services APIs. Eucalyptus helps organizations pool together their resources such as compute, network and storage which in turn gives end users the ability to tap into on-demand resources within hybrid and private clouds.
It is being reported that HP has purchased Eucalyptus for an undisclosed amount. HP has largely shied away from mergers and acquisitions considering their last notable acquisition was quite the flop. HP once ponied up $11 billion for Autonomy, which proved to be a catastrophe according to some analysts. HP’s acquisition of Eucalyptus seems much more methodical than the Autonomy deal and the PC giant looks to stretch further into cloud by picking up one of the marquis names in hybrid and private cloud.
“We want to be able to go to those customers and say, ‘When you go with HP Helion, we give you that level of choice.’ We’re not going to try to have you bet just on our public cloud,” says Bill Hilf, SVP at HP Cloud.
Many analysts are describing this deal as having multiple benefits for HP. Not only can they increase the profile of their private cloud offerings , the HP team gains valuable experience by onboarding all of the talent of the Eucalyptus team. Marten Mickos, the CEO of Eucalyptus, will transition into a Vice President and General Manager role reporting directly to HP CEO Meg Whitman. Mickos is notable for his role in the development of MySQL, which was previously purchased by Sun Microsystems for nearly $1 billion.
Eucalyptus, which was founded in 2007, will retain is Goleta, CA office while operating under the HP cloud brand. Before the acquisition, Eucalyptus was awarded over $55 million in funding from venture capital. Although dollar figures have not been announced, many speculate that the purchase of Eucalyptus was at least a 9 figure deal.
Josh Garza, the CEO of GAW Miners, first made a name for himself by building one of the top online retail stores for cryptocurrency mining equipment. Garza has pivoted that operation into the cloud by launching what he has dubbed hashlets. These hashlets are designed to create Bitcoins using a combination of ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and cloud data center technology.
CloudWedge first reported on organizations wanting to use cloud to mint Bitcoins back in March 2014. The write up chronicled CloudHashing.com’s method of selling cloud contracts that “Reserves a certain amount of computational power for your own Bitcoin mining endeavours.” Garza and GAW Miners look to gain a piece of this market share by shifting his company from the online retail world. Instead of selling Bitcoin mining hardware, GAW Miners has pivoted into selling cloud mining contracts. According to Garza, the move was met with unprecedented success.
Garza tells DCKnowledge, “I saw that shipping hardware to people wasn’t going to last forever, so I worked on a plan to migrate our business to a cloud model.” Garza continues by mentioning that his eCommerce provider was knocked offline by the enormous amount of interest in cloud bitcoin mining contracts. In fact, Garza said, “We had to slow down because we were running out of data center capacity.”
Garza’s candid comments continue as he talks about how he got into the Bitcoin industry. “I got into mining as a hobby, as a lot of people do. I ran into some unsavory companies and lost money on a couple of deals. I just wanted to create an alternative so people could do business with confidence. And it kind of exploded.”
Garza recently shelled out over $1 million for the domain name BTC.com and GAW recently bought out ZenMiner for $8 million in order to expand his this growing Bitcoin cloud mining endeavors. At current rates, Garza’s hashlet products are expected to give Bitcoin speculators a return on their investment within 2 months.
In a society that celebrates the public broadcast of an individual’s life through multiple mediums, the return to a more modest ideal may be the only way forward.
Increasingly over the last ten years or so, Millennials, and what some refer to as Generation Z, have been pressured to share intimate aspects of their lives over the internet. If you look back, there has been an interesting trend with this.
Facebook let users share as much content as they wished with whomever they wished. There are adaptable security settings, so that users could decide what is fully public and what is just for their friends. Then came Instagram and Twitter. More popular with the younger Millennials and most of Generation Z, they developed the new phenomenon of broadcasting edited snippets of their lives, but with infinitely more people.
For Twitter, in 140 characters or less, information as menial as what someone ate for breakfast can be shared with the entire world. Alternatively, look at Instagram. You can see snapshots of someone’s day, all shown through their chosen filter. To anyone looking in, they see more, of less.
What I mean by this is, these social platforms created a performance space whereby Shakespeare’s “all the words a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” is truer than ever. Users were given the ability to post designed posts, and create whatever version of their lives they wish others to see. This is well shown in this video:
Now this incessant need to digitally capture and share intimate aspects of our lives has been challenged.
A large number of celebrities have had their phones/iCloud accounts (or whatever the culprit was) hacked, and extremely intimate photos published online for all the world to see. What is crazy is just how many people have looked up those images, and don’t feel that there is anything wrong with it. Now Jimmy Kimmel is not necessarily a news source, but take a look at how these men feel about looking-up the images:
The publication of someone’s personal images without their permission is not only abhorrent, but in this case has been referred by some as a sex-crime.
As a reaction to the hacking/leak, a lot of people are starting to distrust online security, or more specifically the cloud. Back in May, it was discovered that Snapchat images were not necessarily as short-lived as people would hope. So what is the solution?
Two things need to happen. Firstly, people need to think of uploading to the cloud as getting a tattoo. Be aware that once something is online or in the cloud, it is there for life. This is extremely useful for businesses or other such organizations, or even for storing someone’s music collection. However, it is not necessarily the appropriate place to keep things you will regret down the line. If Facebook’s ever changing privacy settings will teach you anything, it should be that if something is online, it is open to being accessed by whomever. Just look at this video to see what I mean:
Secondly, there needs to be a change in our attitudes to social media overall. I recently read a book by Ben Elton called ‘Blind Faith.’ It is set in a dystopian future where the golden rule is “only perverts do things in private.” In this world, much like Orwell’s 1984, there are cameras everywhere, except here instead of big brother watching – everyone is. Nakedness is celebrated and everyone blogs incessantly. What struck me about this book is that it is an exaggeration of a reality that we are fast approaching.
If nothing else, this celebrity leak should challenge this generation to rethink whether they want social media. Should it return to its’ original roots as a networking platform, to connect and share in the experiences of their friends? Or rather as a stage, whereby they are willing to broadcast all of themselves in the vain hope of being seen or heard, and therefore feel important? In 2010 The Guardian published an article on how Mark Zuckerberg felt that privacy is no longer a social norm.
Small businesses are increasingly seeing the advantage of software as a service. It’s a model that opens up new possibilities to them. There is little or no capital investment and a convenient pay-as-you-go subscription model. It’s no wonder that many SMBs are now using cloud business software they would never have thought of installing on servers on their own site.
Cloud storage is even simpler. The data for entire small business can be uploaded without having to worry about investing in extra hardware or complex technology. But what about ‘Disaster Recovery as a Service’ or DRaaS for short – is that just for the bigger organizations, or does it have something to offer smaller enterprises too?
Beyond data storage
Sending data back-ups to the cloud is already a step forward. It’s typically mush safer than using local disk drives or burning CDs or DVDs to store data. However, in the event of an IT disaster, it may take more than a simple data download to restart operations. Floods, fires, lighting and even traffic snarl-ups can damage servers or make them inaccessible. And that banal but fatal disk crash can have the same effect too.
Effective disaster recovery solutions must therefore handle a range of different potential problems and let organizations rapidly get their IT working again in all cases.
What should DRaaS providers offer?
Your business may be small, but that doesn’t stop it from having the same requirements as bigger corporations. Computer downtime may be just as catastrophic for you as for them. So if DRaaS looks like a good idea, make sure you’re getting all you need.
Recovery time. Making your IT available online may take a few hours, or as little as 5 minutes. Compare this with what your business needs and what it costs – and also with the other solution of trying to do it all by yourself.
Special server platforms. Your enterprise may also be using particular applications or platforms in order to do business. Or you may require your data and applications to comply with specific regulations (health, financial or other). If you want to use DRaaS, make sure your provider gives you not only the right technical resources, but also any necessary regulatory compliance.
Data back-up or online computing environments? Not every DRaaS solution includes both back-ups and replication of your computing facilities. If you want both items covered, check the service agreement before you sign up.
Getting back to normal afterwards. Using a replicated cloud-based data center may be a godsend if your own IT facilities are out of action. However, when they’re back, you’ll want to transfer your operations back out of the cloud and into your normal IT environment again. So check to see if your DRaaS provider will really be there to help you complete the entire recovery process.
So do small businesses want DRaaS?
The possibilities above motivate small companies to look for smarter online solutions for safeguarding their data and their computing ability. There’s evidence to suggest that they’re taking action too, according to recent (2012) data from Gartner, the market research company.
As many as 90% of DRaaS set-ups are for organizations running just 3 to 6 enterprise applications, with between 2 and 5 terabytes of associated data storage. While it’s better to think out your own solution rather than just copying what other SMBs are doing, statistics like these suggest it’s worth taking a look at DRaaS.
VMware’s annual confab, VMworld, takes place in San Francisco this year. At that conference, VMware is expected to release additions to its public cloud infrastructure vCHS in efforts to differentiate its business model from other providers.
Although vCHS has been around for the less a year, the infrastructure has received mixed reviews. Some administrators seem to love the way it integrates into VMware’s vCenter while others note the lack of features and functionality found within the interface. According to Bill Fathers, SVP & GM at VMware, naysayers may finally get their way.
“Looking at the adoption of public cloud over the last five years, there’s no question that it’s kind of reached a bit of a sticking point,” says Fathers in an interview with eWeek. “The current model isn’t going to continue to scale. And as we know, this is the next phase of the adoption of the enterprise public cloud.
“As a result, we’re going to continue to double down and pile on services that will help us differentiate in the area of compatibility.”
Fathers continues by mentioning that VMware is looking for a way to connect with customers to show that VMware’s vCHS offering gives better compatibility and more flexibility for the workloads you currently utilise on-site.
Fathers says: “We want to differentiate ourselves with our public cloud by saying to our customers and potential customers: ‘Look, we think the compatibility with your existing environments is THE key.’ In the last year, we’ve proven that to ourselves (internally).”
Fathers continues by mentioning the success of DRaaS. Disaster Recovery as a Service is one way for shops that can use VMware’s vCHS service to begin utilising the cloud services. In fact, Fathers mentioned that DRaaS is “fast becoming VMware’s fastest-growing product globally.”
VMware looks to capitalize on DRaaS’s success by launching other niche products that give data center administrators more confidence in choosing vCHS over the competition.