Stagnant budgets, overwhelming data growth, and new user and application demands, are just a few of the many challenges that are putting IT organizations under more pressure today than ever before. As a result, a new approach is required. This session by Hitcahi Data Systems’ Jeff Lundberg at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013] will discuss why object storage based private cloud is necessary for evolving into a next-generation of IT that supports a new world of applications and storage service delivery models.

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PayPal is moving its 15,000 nodes off on VMware, the proprietary cloud
platform, to the relatively unstable OpenStack, the anti-Amazon open source
cloud platform backed by IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat and Rackspace.

If the migration is successful, then eBay, PayPal’s parent company, is likely
to follow suit and move its 65,000 physical nodes to OpenStack, retaining
some sort of VMware reserve if VMware is lucky.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced global availability of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) optimized support for four additional Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) instance types. The support enables optimized performance between standard and provisioned IOP EBS volumes and EC2 instances to meet different bandwidth or throughput needs (learn more about AWS EBS, EC2, S3 and Glacier here).
The four EBS optimized instance types are m3.xlarge, m3.2xlarge, m2.2xlarge and c1.xlarge for dedicated bandwidth or throughput between the EC2 instances and EBS volumes. The performance or bandwidth ranges from 500 Mbits (500 / 8 = 62.5 MBytes) per second, to 1,000 Mbits (1,000 / 8 = 125MBytes) per second depending on the type of instance. As a refresher, EC2 instances (why by time you read this could change) vary in size and functionality. This includes different amounts of EC2 Unit of Compute (ECU), number of virtual cores, amount of storage space included, 32 or 64 bit, storage and networking IO performance, and EBS Optimized or not. In addition to instances, different operating system images can be installed using those licensed from AWS such as various Windows and Unix or supply your own.

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Gartner’s been gazing at its crystal ball again, and has forecast that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and so forth – will displace more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.

The analyst house stresses that IT companies need to “bridge legacy offerings and new services”, again pointing a future to the cloud for service providers.

And cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate than other elements of the IT services market. Hardware and software support will grow slowly compared to IaaS and BPaaS (business process as a service), which will grow 13.1% and 47.3% in 2013 respectively according to Gartner.

There are three recommendations Gartner has for service providers this year; stopping undifferentiated marketing messages, emphasising business value to ‘transform clients’ existing operations’; improving service delivery by reinventing the service portfolio; and determining …

The recent meteor blast over the skies of Russia served a reminder that humanity lives in a constant state of mortal peril. Surely, we can be serious, even as we make fatuous references to movies like “Airplane” along the way.

Despite our solar system’s occasional warnings of potential doom, humans continue to pose the most lethal threat to themselves. We continue all manners of mayhem against one another on scales large and small, justifying the large-scale stuff by waving our national flags and elevating them to near-divine status.

I’m reminded of all this on a grim, grey early-spring Sunday in northern Illinois, as I read of President Obama’s and Secretary of State John Kerry’s visits to the Middle East, of the intriguing death of a Russian oligarch, of a coup in Central Africa, and of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Africa.

Xi’s visit was covered today by an excellent Reuters story, and is the only one mentioned above that’s not directly related to violence. But the sub-text of Xi’s visit is China’s increasing influence in all regions of the world, and its intentions.

China seems perilously close to war with Japan, the Philippines, and Malaysia in disputes over a few resource-rich islands, it remains in an unresolved political standoff with Taiwan, and its friend North Korea seems ready to go off the deep end any day. Do China’s leaders wish to build good long-term relations in Africa, or is the country intend to impose Colonialism 2.0?

Now, To Our Research
We’ve been conducting research about national ICT commitments over the past two years, and have found China to be lagging. This may sound surprising given the rate of China’s economic growth, and numerous stories (many of which I’ve written) about its investments in cloud computing.

But relatively speaking, China has not been as aggressive with ICT as many of its Asian neighbors. It badly trails South Korea, for example, but also trails Japan, Malaysia, and the Philippines, among others. Our research takes into account income disparity and cost-of-living, areas in our rankings that penalize a Chinese economy that is seeing increased disparity and higher overall costs. China today seems more focused on ensuring its future through acquisition of natural resources than through technology.

We’ve found some promise in the Middle East, although this region trails Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and both Northern and Eastern Africa in the way we rank ICT commitments and potential. The region will surely improve if peaceful solutions are ever brought to bear to its numerous conflicts.

But the Middle East does lead the so-called BRICs nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in both commitments and potential. Again, this may sound surprising, but the reality is the BRICs were chosen for their sheer size more than anything. Each of them has an individual, complex story, but it seems that none of them are focusing enough on ICT.

Our rankings now cover 102 countries, and it should be no surprise that most of the world’s leaders are peaceful, from the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, to Canada, to New Zealand and South Korea. (The latter does have a potentially hair-trigger border, but does not routinely embroil itself in other disputes, as does its U.S. ally and as do so many other Asian nations.)

So we carry on with our research, just as diplomats carry on with their ostensible efforts to bring peace to the world. We believe that technology can be a great playing-field leveler, for developing nations as a whole and for individuals everywhere. We will continue to push and expand our research, advocate for peace, and hope that a fireball – natural or man-made – doesn’t consume us all.

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Symantec recently took a stroll down memory lane to revisit the first seeds of cloud computing that took hold more than a half-century ago.
Symantec created an interactive timeline that illustrates the history of cloud computing, highlighting just how far the technology has progressed.
The interactive map, however, does more than just recall the roots of cloud computing; it provides an opportunity to look ahead as well.
Symantec has plans to help usher in an era of safe, agile and efficient cloud computing. It recently outlined a strategy to get there, which includes providing companies with a variety of cloud solutions to address their specific needs and current IT environments, according to an article on CMSWire.com.
The future of the cloud holds plenty of challenges. As cloud computing becomes the new normal, many companies are looking to move their businesses to the cloud. To meet these needs, and to continue to evolve alongside changing technologies, businesses should look to cloud computing not as a means to an end, but rather as an enabler of change, according to the article.

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Last week seems to have been an important week for the Windows Azure team at Microsoft. They have provided some new and improved features to Windows Azure. There were also some new feature releases from Google, Amazon and Eucalyptus. And, Hortonworks releases new version of the Sandbox.
Here’s a quick sum up of Cloud happenings over the last week.
To start with, Microsoft has added a number of new features to Windows Azure over the last week. The new features include HDInsight sevice, support for Dropbox and Mercurial repositories, and a few updates to Mobile Services.

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Cisco blogged Monday that it intents to acquire the privately held Viennese cloud company SolveDirect for its cloud integration software. It said nothing about price.
In 2009 Cisco promised to underwrite the operation, then a subsidiary of Brain Force Holding AG, to the tune of €6 million over the years and fund its expansion into the US with the objective of tripling its revenues.
As part of the deal Brain Force spun it off but was still an investor, now probably holding less than 50%. It depends on how much Cisco’s investment in the firm diluted its position.
In 2008, SolveDirect generated revenues of €5.7 million and an EBITDA of over €1 million, employing 41 people. Cisco is reportedly a SolveDirect customer. The Austrian company is also a partner of BMC, which is currently in the throes of getting auctioned off and taken private.

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The responsibility for proper consumption of Cloud resources doesn’t fall to a single role in our organization. Rather, developers, operations personnel, as well as the managers responsible for the Cloud provider business relationship must work together to ensure the code is correct, the configurations are efficient, and the costs are transparent and carefully monitored.
There’s nothing worse than opening your water bill and finding that it’s a hundred dollars more than you expected. You scour your house and find the culprit: a leaky toilet or perhaps a dripping faucet. Hard to believe a simple drip drip drip can run up your water bill so dramatically, but those drips add up, quickly.

Replace the water with IT capability, and you have Cloud Computing. The pay-as-you-go utility model for Cloud promises dramatic cost savings, especially when unpredictable demand in a traditional, on-premise environment would require poorly utilized servers, sitting mostly idle on the off chance some spike in demand comes along. But just as with your water bill, there are many ways for your Cloud bill to go through the roof unexpectedly. Recognizing the Cloud equivalents to your problem plumbing fixtures can make the difference between saving money in the Cloud and flushing your savings down the drain.

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By, Elliot Curtis, Senior Director, Channel Development, Parallels

The world of the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) has changed radically over the last few years and continues to evolve as the Cloud becomes more and more pervasive for businesses of all sizes. Here, I take a look at just a few trends that ISVs face and the implications for their business.

Everyone is becoming an ISV: With advances in development tools and IaaS/PaaS, the barriers to building and delivering a business oriented SaaS application are very low. Consequently, IT services companies of all types (VARs, SIs, Hosters, Web Designers, etc.) find it easy to move into adjacent ISV categories. It is a relatively reliable way of generating new reoccurring revenue from an existing customer base and increases customer stickiness. As a result, traditional SaaS ISVs are facing an increasingly crowded market with many competitors who have a built-in customer base. Having a clear understanding of routes-to-market and channel strategy has become increasingly critical for application success, and ISVs should be prepared to develop strategic relationships that help reduce the burden of getting in front of potential customers.

Enterprise problems are becoming SMB problems and even Consumer problems: Starting in the middle of the last decade a lot of money was spent by Enterprise IT on trying to solve hard problems around the applications they supported for their business clients. How can data get shared across multiple applications? How do users avoid multiple application authentications and credentials? How do users quickly find the application they need? SMBs typically avoided tackling these issues because they either had pretty simple application requirements or they could afford to ignore the problem. But, because of the Cloud, what used to be limited to the realm of Enterprise IT has started to become everyone’s problem. SMBs (and I’ll throw consumers in too) increasingly have access to a huge variety of applications that would have been unthinkable even five years ago, and while their tolerance for multiple log-ins, siloed solutions, and difficult application discovery is pretty high, it is shrinking fast. For applications to become more SMB friendly, ISVs need to think about: single sign-on support for the customer, applications being aware of other applications so that data is shared, and application discoverability based on user requirements. These are not problems ISVs can solve in isolation and are also issues shared by Cloud Marketplace providers, who are increasingly the face to the customer. The ecosystem needs to have standardized models and approaches that offer open participation and a scalable approach.

Cross application & platform support: Again, this used to be an Enterprise only challenge that was solved by a centralized support organization that understood the infrastructure and the applications running on that infrastructure within the confines of Enterprise IT. With the proliferation of SaaS applications, marketplaces and aggregator/brokers, all of whom have a part to play in delivering the service to the customer, how does the SMB customer get effective and rapid resolution to their problem? Consider the complexity: a customer may purchase a suite of SaaS apps from a Service Provider or Marketplace that is using a Service Delivery Platform from yet another software vendor and meanwhile each SaaS ISV is running their own application in a datacenter somewhere. Questions such as; “Who owns Tier 1 support & how do incidents get escalated?” are just scratching the surface of business rules. Operationally, there may be as many as five or six different support systems that all need to talk to each other with a taxonomy everyone involved understands. If effective technical and business solutions are not implemented up-front, support will quickly become a huge expense and a customer satisfaction nightmare.

As SaaS ISVs think through their go-to-market strategies and execution plans, these are three critical areas that have implications for future growth and sustainability. A key to success is to explore emerging standards such as APS 2.0 and Cloud companies that are working to help overcome these challenges.