Open source cloud computing software CloudStack, which is developed by all-volunteer association the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has this week graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top level project. The move signifies the maturity of CloudStack as an open source tool for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services.
CloudStack uses existing hypervisors such as KVM, vSphere, and XenServer/XCP for virtualisation and supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API as well as offering its own. Target environments include service providers and enterprises where it can be used to set up on-demand cloud computing services or a private cloud for use by internal employees.
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes.
In his Opening Keynote at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Danny Sabbah, CTO and General Manager Next Generation Platform at IBM, will detail the critical architectural considerations and success factors organizations must internalize to successfully implement, optimize and innovate using next generation architectures.
The lack of emphasis on self-service Private Clouds is a telling indicator of the state of Cloud Computing (in particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS) in the enterprise. If an enterprise IT shop were to truly implement a self-service Private Cloud, and actually got it to work properly, then the enterprise development teams would be able to manage the entire production environment for themselves. There’d be nothing left for the operational IT folks to do except make sure to replace bad hard drives and the like. No more server or network administration. No more break/fix. No more reason to get that healthy salary – or any salary at all, for that matter.
Windows Azure Active Directory ( WAAD ), a cloud-friendly REST-based implementation of Active Directory for identity management of cloud applications, is now generally available for production cloud apps as a FREE service. WAAD provides consistent centralized identity management for Microsoft Office 365, Windows Intune and your own cloud-based applications. In addition, WAAD can be integrated with an on-premise Windows Server Active Directory via DirSync and Active Directory Federation Services ( ADFS ) gateway components.
In this article, I’ll provide a set of resources that you can use to get started exploring and leveraging Windows Azure Active Directory for your applications …
Cost, tech, service: Which do you value most in a cloud solution?
Whenever you go shopping there are usually a few factors that determine what you buy and what you pass up.
One is obviously money (though we all wish this wasn’t the case). Price can be a deciding factor, but often we will pay a little more for something if it offers measurable value.
Another factor is trust: Do you know what’s being sold? Do you trust who’s selling it? Can you trust that it will fulfill your needs?
The flipside of trust is often chance: Are you willing to take a chance on a new product that will hopefully deliver the same or better results than your tried-and-true choice?
Half of those polled in the latest cloudy survey have said they will “definitely” look to expand their data centres in the coming year, with the vast majority of remaining respondents claiming they will expand in 2014.
The survey, commissioned by data bods Digital Realty Trust and conducted by Campos Research and Analysis, spoke to 300 IT execs and concluded that this explosion in data centre usage was primarily down to the proliferation of private clouds.
Three in five (61%) cited an internal cloud as an “extremely important reason” for expansion, with the main data centre driver being security (67%).
Other interesting drivers noted in the top 10 were disaster recovery (62%), new apps and services (61%) and virtualisation (57%).
The most popular place to build a new data centre is New York, according to the research, with 65% of those surveyed citing the most interest in the Big Apple …
At first blush, it sounds like a mystic’s riddle, somewhere in the vicinity of the sound of one hand clapping. But in reality, it’s a setup that makes perfect sense: Rackspace runs its OpenStack cloud in another OpenStack cloud.
“We’re running our cloud inside of a cloud,” John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, recently told Wired.com. “All of the control nodes that are necessary to serve the customers on our cloud are running in another OpenStack cloud.”
The arrangement is only natural. “It’s a better way of doing things,” Engates said. “We’re merely eating our own dog food. The application we’re offering to customers is running on that same application.”
OpenStack is a way of pooling resources from a vast collection of machines, including processing power and storage space. Rather than running your software application on a particular server, you run it on OpenStack, a platform that spans hundreds of servers, and this platform can grab you as much processing power as you need, whenever you need it. This makes it easier to launch applications, but it also makes it easier to expand or “scale” them – to reach more users with more servers. And when a server fails, the platform is smart enough to move the machine’s work to a new one.
Riding the current software defined data center (SDC) wave being led by the likes of VMware and software defined networking (SDN) also championed by VMware via their acquisition of Nicera last year, Software Defined Marketing (SDM) is in full force. HP being a player in providing the core building blocks for traditional little data and big data, along with physical, virtual, converged, cloud and software defined has announced a new compute, processor or server platform called the Moonshot 1500.
GoGrid, a cloud infrastructure company, and Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, on Tuesday announced the availability of Cloud Path for GoGrid, a joint offering for migrating customers’ existing server workloads to GoGrid’s cloud platform free of charge.
The Cloud Path software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering is a customer self-service web portal for automated migration of existing Windows and Linux servers to GoGrid Cloud Server instances. There is no infrastructure to deploy or maintain on the customer site. Plus, the live capture of server workloads eliminates powering down servers and means no server downtime.
“This free migration solution provides an average cost savings of $800 per server migrated versus manual processes,” said Lawrence Guillory, CEO, Racemi. “Even more important, it reduces customers’ migration project timelines from days, weeks, or even months to just hours.”
Explore SSD technology and key considerations when designing SSDs into cloud computing environments. Learn about the best known practices to overcome IO bottlenecks and accelerate cloud applications.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Tahmid Rahman, an Applications Engineer at Intel, and Chuck Brown, Data Center SSD Product Line Manager at Intel, will cover key aspects of storage subsystem metrics including Quality of Service (QoS) and how IOP consistency is critical to cloud storage deployment and performance; SSD endurance needs within cloud deployment and its verification methods; and Reliability and Serviceability features to ensure stress free protection of cloud storage. This session also covers new SSD caching methods for accelerating SAN storage farms, achieving breakthrough performance with existing infrastructure and Intel SSD technology.