That’s some serious savings, even in a state where just about everything seems to cost just a bit more.
A recent study has found that moving common software applications used by 86 million U.S. workers to the cloud could save enough energy annually to power Los Angeles for a year.
The six-month study was led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and conducted with Northwestern University.
The report looks at three common business applications – email, customer relationship management software, or CRM, and bundled productivity software (spreadsheets, file sharing, word processing). Moving these software applications from local computer systems to centralized cloud services could cut IT energy consumption by up to 87 percent – about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. This is roughly the amount of electricity used each year by all the homes, businesses and industry in Los Angeles, according to an article on DailyFusion.net.
Windows Azure VMs – New “Stopped” VM Options Provide Flexibility
This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros. Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform.
Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future. And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges.
In this article, I’ll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I’ll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs.
Book Excerpt: Fundamental Cloud Architectures
This chapter introduces and describes several of the more common foundational cloud architectural models, each exemplifying a common usage and characteristic of contemporary cloud-based environments. The involvement and importance of different combinations of cloud computing mechanisms in relation to these architectures are explored.
IT resources can be horizontally scaled via the addition of one or more identical IT resources, and a load balancer that provides runtime logic capable of evenly distributing the workload among the available IT resources (Figure 1). The resulting workload distribution architecture reduces both IT resource over-utilization and under-utilization to an extent dependent upon the sophistication of the load balancing algorithms and runtime logic.
Predictive Analytics, Cloud Computing, and Healthcare
The use of big data with predictive analytics systems layered on top has a tremendous amount of potential in the healthcare market. Indeed, when paired with cloud-based platforms, there is the potential to become more cost effective, and much better at delivering healthcare services.
The fact of the matter is that most healthcare providers are under-funded, which leads to being under-automated and under-innovative. Moreover, there seems to be a growing chasm between those who deliver healthcare to patients, and those who drive IT within healthcare provider organizations.
The statistics back this up. According to Gartner, anticipated growth opportunities put some industries at the top when it comes to global IT spending. However, Healthcare Providers were not in the top for growth opportunities, coming in at $15,311M. Even Utilities beat them out by a projected $18,756M. Think about the number of changes in the world of healthcare providers. These numbers are surprising at best, or very scary at worst.
The solution to this problem of “too much to do and not enough resources to do it” is to leverage the right new technologies, apply careful planning, and move from a reactive to proactive state in the world of healthcare IT.
Tod Nielsen Named CEO of Heroku
Tod Nielsen, whose name is probably more recognized because of his dozen years at Microsoft than his recent turns at VMware, Borland or Oracle, is now CEO of Heroku, the cloud application development platform that’s part of saleforce.com thanks to its $212 million acquisition in 2010.
Splunk’s “Hunk” makes dealing with Hadoop big data easy
Earlier this week we got to speak with Sanjay Mehta, VP of Product Marketing, and Clint Sharp, Senior Product Manager, Big Data; concerning the (beta) launch of a new product, “Hunk”, making exploring data stored in Hadoop easy.
In fact, one of the taglines randomly generated on the company’s website is “taking the ‘sh’ out of IT”, solutions which work for clients in the real-world is a clear priority.
Sanjay gives an interview of the company’s background: “What we are all about is making machine-generated data accessible using a valuable to different kinds of users in an organisation.”
To re-affirm their current products are a trusted solution used by many businesses already, Sanjay states: “We have a flagship product called Splunk Enterprise, which is deployed to around 5,600 customers around the world.”
So how is Splunk’s current, industry-leading platform being used today? He explains: “It’s …
Time for a change is always now
It is often said that Europeans are more conservative in their outlook with regard to change.
There are occasions when this is a useful cultural trait, like limiting the rampant commercialisation of fine heritage sites or taking care to uphold a traditional method for creating a really good cheese. But when it comes to technology resistance to change it only brings disaster.
Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to cloud computing. The “readiness for the cloud’ debate is so bound up in what we think it is today NOT what it actually delivers and the clear and unambiguous direction it is heading towards – That if they keep debating instead of doing, swathes of business will still be pontificating in empty boardrooms as the bailiffs come to take their chairs away.
For many the ‘cloud’ means re-writing their apps, putting their data somewhere outside, and in some cases it will …
Oracle & Salesforce Cut Broad Cloud Pact
Oracle and salesforce.com, two rivals that have been personally at each other’s throats from time to time, said Tuesday that they’ve cut a comprehensive nine-year partnership involving all three tiers of cloud computing: applications, platform and infrastructure.
Late Monday Oracle and Microsoft, also not the best of friends, said Oracle widgetry would run on Azure. The turnabout should probably worry VMware, Red Hat, SAP and maybe even Amazon.
Salesforce, the SaaS maven, is supposed to standardize on Oracle Linux, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database and the Java middleware platform.
Oracle is supposed to integrate salesforce.com with its Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, and provide the core technology to power salesforce.com’s applications and platform.
Are You Using an Older Version of Salesforce.com’s Service?
The answer is – it isn’t possible. “No one’s ever on an old version of Salesforce.com because Salesforce.com is multitenant, that is everybody shares the same servers, so when those servers are upgraded, everybody’s upgraded.”
Naturally, when a perplexed customer asked me whether “Navatar runs on an older version of Salesforce,” I became very curious about what could have prompted that question.
When the customer revealed that a consulting firm had advised him about Navatar being on an older version, the mystery began to unfold. Basically, consultants and systems integrators make money customizing software. Some of them don’t like Navatar’s pre-built software for financial firms (built on the Salesforce platform) since it reduces the hours they can bill to a customer. To steer the customer away from off-the-shelf products, they feed false information so they can make money re-inventing the wheel.
Is Your Cloud Ready for the Enterprise?
Reading my newsfeed this morning I noticed several articles talking about the cloud and the enterprise. There is no doubt that the area is heating up with more and more acquisitions (IBM buys Softlayer), investments (GE invests $105M in Pivotal) and fights over big deals (IBM vs. AWS for the CIA cloud) but the question that comes up is: “Are the cloud platforms ready for the enterprise?”
Being involved with numerous cloud projects I see five areas that enterprises emphasize when they evaluate their options. Those are not too different from the criteria they use for any other software offering but here is the cloud run-down.