The data boom is a very real mark on the industry landscape, with the potential and hype surrounding big data expected to increase dramatically. But what can this data practically do?

Speakers at a Mobile World Congress conference session on Monday gave various insights into the discussion, with the conclusion being that, in both developed and developing markets, big data has the potential to be a lifesaver.

One of the big players in this sphere is IBM, with CTO Paul Bloom examining what its supercomputer, Watson, is now doing after it won a million dollars – which IBM gave to charity – beating two former Jeopardy! multi-champions in 2011.

The concept Bloom pushed was ‘cognitive computing’ – a ‘cross between super-computing, manual technology and neuroscience’. During its brief game show career, Bloom insisted Watson wasn’t connected to the Internet, yet had access to over 200 million pages of structured and unstructured data …

by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

 

Cloud infrastructure is now available in two different flavors.

–          Small Cloud (virtual private server and cloud server), and

–          Big Cloud (datacenter in the cloud)

 

Small cloud is all about delivering a flexible compute unit. Virtual Private Server enables small cloud with a compute instance available from a provider with predefined set of resources, and prepaid for a set period of time. Cloud Server delivers small cloud as an elastic compute instance, pre-paid or available on an hourly usage basis, self-healing, and highly available.

 

Big cloud, on the other hand delivers infinite scalability, complete pay per usage model, high availability and data center level durability. Big cloud mimics an on-premise datacenter with the added options of multi-tenancy and hybrid architecture (ability to stretch workloads between on-premise and cloud).

 

For most SMB and many enterprise IT needs you do not need an infinitely elastic and scalable, priced by the millisecond big cloud.  The new breed of virtualization can deliver on most of the cloud server requirements, closing the gap between virtual private server and cloud server, further improving small cloud offerings.   

 

–          Most compute tasks and workloads have predictable granularity (size) and spikiness

–          At low cost the value of elasticity goes down to zero  

–          You can get most of the elasticity benefits out of new breed of virtualization technology without invoking a cloud genie

–          You do not need a cloud to convert CAPEX into OPEX

 

Granularity

We always knew that the cloud would be a perfect solution if your workload or application required a copious amount of compute power and you either could not predict exactly how much, or the “how much” wildly fluctuated. Saving just 10% of your hardware expense on these massive enterprise workloads is worth millions and justifies the corresponding cloud migration.

 

The reality of many applications, however is that they have predictable usage patterns and more importantly that they can be delivered from one or just a few pre-sized containers or VMs. With the growth of compute power in virtual servers, the size of the compute tasks that can be flexibly managed from within a single server has also increased.  Because virtual servers have an increased compute power, a number of workloads and applications which once required a big-cloud solution, now work perfectly within containers and VMs.

 

Low cost

With container-based VPSs available to SMBs at $20-$50 range, the benefit of cloud usage and related cost savings are just not worth the trouble. 10% savings on 20$ investment simply does not matter unless you are desperate for a latte. If anything the opposite maybe happening with SMBs willing to invest in hosted dedicated servers, because value of the applications they are running is so much higher than cost of a hosted box. 

 

Elastic Virtualization

Virtualization by itself is now cloudy enough to eliminate the need for the cloudiness at the next level of the stack. VMs can be migrated live to servers with adequate resources; containers can be scaled for memory and CPU without shutting down. With technologies like Parallels Cloud Storage, storage resources can be added to a container or VM as needed and on the fly. These technologies allow for flexible provisioning where elasticity is built into the containers and VMs directly. For more on that see my previous blog on new breed of container virtualization.

 

CAPEX conversion

And finally, do you really need a cloud to flexibly lease your compute resources? Hosters have been offering this option to SMBs for the last 10 years. A container or a VM can be rented from an infrastructure provider on a monthly basis and flexible container and VM payments are now extended to hourly granularity.

 

So who needs a big cloud? I do not think much changed here since the early years of the cloud wave. The above-virtualization-layer clouds are still needed in all massive data scenarios:

–          Massive applications with unpredictable usage fluctuations

–          Massive applications with unpredictable growth patterns and need for fully automated scaling

–          Overflow scenarios or what industry our describes as cloud bursting

 

Big clouds are for big data. What really changed is applicability of small cloud to the needs of simple workloads in the enterprise and most of workloads of the small and business businesses. This means that until SMB IT needs can be fulfilled from a SaaS layer, small cloud will be the engine of growth for the cloud providers delivering infrastructure services in both SMB and the enterprise space.

 

HP is selling webOS, the last vestige of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010. The once promising operating system is going to LG, the giant Korean electronics firm, which means to use it in smart TVs.
According to CNET, which broke the story, LG is getting the webOS source code, licenses from HP, patents from Palm, related documentation, engineering talent and related webOS web sites on undisclosed terms.
LG said it was definitely not using the widgetry in a smartphone. It’s got Android for that.
LG also said webOS will remain open source and supposedly it won’t be forked.
HP is retaining rights to webOS solutions and to webOS cloud technologies, including its apps catalogue and updating service.

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Bring the solution to your CEO. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Rob LaMear, CEO & Founder of Fpweb.net, shares his findings while talking cloud with over 1,000 CEOs around the globe. Delegates will learn what cloud barriers exist and how to remove them.
Rob LaMear IV is CEO & Founder of Fpweb.net. He started Fpweb.net from scratch and believes that the key to success has been its people and the energy they bring, hands down. He has been with SharePoint since its inception and his passion for customer care and delivering a premium product has set a new standard in SharePoint Hosting. As much as he likes work and technology, LaMear loves spending time with his family completely unplugged and has never missed an opportunity to join a pickup game of soccer in the park.

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NJVC, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia, is pleased to announce the winner of the George Mason University (GMU) Student PaaS Developer Contest. For the contest, students used the Cloudcuity AppDeployer platform as a service (PaaS) to develop business software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in the cloud. The winning team entry, “Nimbus Solution Scheduler,” is a workforce scheduling application.

The Nimbus Solution Scheduler team members—James Hays (team leader), Christopher Le, Anthony Nester and Ed Rubins—each received a monetary award and certificate for their innovative application. The students were honored at a special ceremony on February 22 during National Engineering Week at the Volgeneau School of Engineering Nguyen Engineering Building, Fairfax, Va. Donald Gantz, Ph.D., chair of the GMU Applied Information Technology Department attended the ceremony.
The GMU contest is serving as a pilot for a regional contest for university students to design SaaS applications for a scholarship award and additional rewards. This contest will launch during the first quarter of 2013.

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Following a series of posts about the new OpenNebula 4.0 features, the OpenNebula project has published a preview of the the brand new Sunstone. OpenNebula 4.0 Sunstone has some beautiful new looks, but it’s not only about the external appearance there has also been a major boost for the user experience by redefining the users workflow.
In this post we will show a few snapshots of some new Sunstone key features. The new wizard screen eases the task of creating and updating Virtual Machines. There’s also new functionality to update very easily existing resources using the extended info panel.

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CipherCloud, the cloud information protection start-up, has moved its encryption platform to Box.com to make it safer for any organization that uses Box’ ostensibly secure file-sharing widgetry and by default encourage cloud adoption by those spooked at the mere thought of putting data in the cloud despite the cloud’s obvious collaborative and cost advantages.
CipherCloud’s open platform provides encryption, tokenization, malware detection and user activity auditing that forestalls downloads of confidential content based on security policies.

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There’s still a need for a more focused and refined understanding of what Cloud service level agreements should be and ultimately a more concerted approach towards the applications. So while neologisms such as speed, agility and flexibility remain synonymous with Cloud Computing, its success and maturity ultimately depend upon a new focal point, namely velocity.
Velocity bears a distinction from speed in that it’s not just a measure of how fast an object travels but also in what direction that object moves. For example in a Public Cloud whether that be Amazon, Azure or Google no one can dispute the speed. Through only the clicks of a button you have a ready-made server that can immediately be used for testing and development purposes. But while it may be quick to deploy, how optimised is it for your particular environment, business or application requirements? With only generic forms the specific customization to a particular workload or business requirement fails to be achieved as optimization is sacrificed for the sake of speed. Service levels based on uptime and availability are not an adequate measure or guarantee for the successful deployment of an application. For example it would be considered ludicrous to purchase a laptop from a service provider that merely stipulates a guarantee that it will remain powered on even though it performs atrociously.

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Signing up and signing on are major threats to any cloud application business. What approaches can an application provider take, and what are the implications on the business?
Did you know that:
Half of paid SaaS customers do not use the application at all
Nine out of 10 has left an application when they forgot a password, instead of restoring it
Eighty-six percent may leave a web site when asked to sign up
Two out of five would rather scrub the toilet than come up with a new password
These figures, based on research from Totango and Janrain in 2012, clearly show that sign-up and sign-on are major issues for any cloud application provider.

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