The growing use of Infrastructure as a Service to run custom applications, SaaS, and PaaS offerings is increasing the demand of management solutions to leverage the automation offered by IaaS.  One of the biggest advantages of IaaS is the ability to automate tasks which were not possible before.  E.g. a crashed server can be restored with an API call by launching a new instance.

read more

Metamarkets, the analytics start-up that wants to be the “Visicalc of Big Data,” has gotten a $15 million B round led by new investor Khosla Ventures – Vinod was one of Sun’s founders.
Existing backers IA Ventures, True Ventures, Village Ventures and AOL Ventures kicked in. AOL is a customer. Advertising don’t you know
The new money brings total capital raised so far to $23 million. It’s earmarked for product development and sales and marketing. It’s pushing into social media and payment start-ups where the data is massive.

read more

While storage area networks (SANs) have become the ubiquitous deployment model for interconnecting data storage systems via high-speed networks such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI, IT administrators are now rethinking the traditional SAN in light of new technologies and economic models enabled by the cloud.
Cloud storage and enterprise-class cloud storage gateways have recently begun to overcome these limitations using a pay-as-you-go cost model, unlimited capacity, multi-site scalability and even cloud-based disaster recovery without dedicated infrastructure and resources.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Nicos Vekiarides, CEO & Co-Founder of TwinStrata, will discuss how Cloud SANs are rapidly becoming a new approach to building and enhancing storage area networks.

read more

There’s a new currency being traded by individuals for information and services, and traded among companies that use it to increase the value of their offerings. This new currency is identity information – all of the digital data about an individual – and it’s the currency of the Identity Economy.
Cloud Service Providers and many of the companies that use their services are well suited to prosper in the emerging Identity Economy – if they start planning now to implement solutions beyond traditional identity management.
As more applications and services move to the cloud, new identity data-related challenges emerge. Overcoming these challenges will require a more customer-centric model for identity-centered markets, paving the way for successful participation in the Identity Economy.

read more

As more and more large enterprises start to make public adoptions of cloud and service providers figuring out the role they play in the market, one of the biggest potential cloud adopters has been watching and looking for signs that the market can support one of the most public facing cloud deployments. Yes, Governments have […]

read more

VMTurbo has added application delivery visibility to its intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments.
The new Operations Manager 3.1 basically assures companies that it’s okay to virtualize business-critical applications because it can ensure service and resource availability based on application performance and business priority. That includes transaction time and performance characteristics for multi-tiered applications
The widgetry expands VMTurbo’s patented Economic Scheduling Engine (ESE) model to the ADC environment, ensuring application performance for multi-tiered business-critical applications.
It says its ESE model provides a fundamentally different method for controlling and managing data center and cloud infrastructures by employing a market-based approach that allocates resources, manages capacity and ensures application performance based on business priority.

read more

There’s no substitute for experience. If you could learn from the successes and failures of an early enterprise cloud pioneer, your own cloud journey could avoid similar pitfalls and perhaps reap faster rewards. Years ago, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia made the strategic decision to migrate to an agile IT operating model, adopting “as-a-service” IT delivery wherever possible. Now, the bank is enjoying the benefits of its early commitment. However, the journey was not always smooth. Implementing a successful cloud strategy is dependent on much more than new technologies, and hinges on a well-designed adoption plan spanning organization, operating model, and IT service portfolio changes.
In their session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Roberts, VP of Strategy and Marketing at ServiceMesh, and Jon Waldron, Executive Architect at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, will explore key lessons learned by the largest bank in Australia during the rollout of multiple enterprise-wide, private cloud services. Find out what worked and what didn’t so you can apply the same lessons to your own cloud initiatives.

read more

It’s April in Vancouver, which got me thinking about clouds.  Although the IT buzz in 2012 has been dominated by mobile and big data, Cloud computing is still a hot topic, especially since it is an enabler for both. In the public Cloud space, Google just launched Drive.

read more

This week I published our latest Cloud Best Practices white paper, called ‘Microsoft Cloud 2.0‘. The main activity of the CBPN is this vendor matching, i.e. we identify the best practice model, and then describe how different vendors can be used to implement those models. In this case Cloud 2.0 mapped on to the Microsoft […]

read more

On Saturday, April 28, the FCC released the full un-redacted report on Google’s Street View project. The report is only 25 pages long and can be found at the bottom of this post.  I find the following tidbits particularly interesting: “ …Engineer Doe developed Wi-Fi data collection software code that, in addition to collecting Wi-Fi network […]

read more