Zencoder performed some initial comparison tests of Google Compute Engine versus Amazon EC2 for transfering and transcoding video.
“On EC2, we use Cluster Compute instances, which are fast dual-CPU machines in two sizes: 4XL and 8XL. We compared these with the fastest GCE instance type, which is currently a single-CPU 8-core server.”
Here’s one of their resulting charts:
Read the full post for details.
There are a lot of benefits to leveraging cloud computing technology but so are barriers. The thoughts of several folks collected through tweet chats is captured in this blog post.
Why is it that cloud computing is maturing but adoption is lagging? This transformational approach has huge potential but compared to the buzz surrounding it, enterprises are just taking baby steps towards widespread adoption. When invited by IBM to do a tweet chat on “Accelerating the Adoption of Cloud”, I liked the opportunity because of the widespread discussion around it as well as controversial enterprise adoption efforts made by “Shadow IT”, a common term used for folks who bypass corporate IT to start their own cloud initiatives.
Akamai Technologies on Thursday reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2012. Revenue for the second quarter of 2012 was $331 million, a 20 percent increase over second quarter 2011 revenue of $277 million.
Net income in accordance with United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, for the second quarter of 2012 was $44 million, or $0.24 per diluted share, an 8 percent decrease from second quarter 2011 GAAP net income of $48 million, or $0.25 per diluted share, and a 2 percent increase from first quarter 2012 GAAP net income of $43 million, or $0.24 per diluted share.
The R language gets a brief mention in an article in yesterday’s New York Times on automated bond trading: The traders here are mostly educated in math or physics, often outside the United States, and their desks are piled high with textbooks like the “R Graphs Cookbook,” for working with obscure computer programming languages. R an obscure programming language? Perhaps the finance desk should drop by the graphics desk sometime, where R is routinely used for the Times’ interactive online and print graphics features. (A visualization of the last century of drought in the US is a particularly elegant recent…
David Smith
A detailed study from the International Data Center (IDC) has shown that companies who use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud make substantial savings over time.
The report, titled ‘Business Value of Amazon Web Services Accelerates Over Time’ and commissioned by AWS, saw the research house interview representatives from 11 organisations which had deployed AWS onto their services.
According to IDC, after three years enterprises should expect to see three and a half times their investment in AWS; and after five years the realisation would be $8.40 per every $1 invested.
“While all customers had enjoyed positive returns on their investment, there is a definite correlation between the length of time they had been AWS customers and their returns”, the report states.
The key statistics from the report are:
“Axway is about secure data transmission – moving data in a highly secured manner,” stated Alan Taylor, Director of Alliances at Axway, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City. Joining Alan in this interview are Mark Clark, Senior Director of Cloud Solutions at ScaleMatrix, and Wendy Petty, Senior Adviser for Cloud Solutions at CA Technologies.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
An interesting thing is occurring in the spaces of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) that is subtle, and while not generally part of the technology hype cycle, seems to be an adjunct of it in these two very specific cases. In espionage, when launching a misinformation campaign, several different avenues are approached for maximum impact, and to increase believability. While I don’t think this over-hype cycle is anything like an espionage campaign, the similarities that do exist are intriguing.
The standard hype cycle tells you how a product category will change the world, we’ve seen it over and over in different forms. Get X or get behind your competitors, Product Y will solve all your business problems and cook you toast in the morning. More revolutionary than water, product Z is the next big thing. Product A will eliminate the need for (insert critical IT function here)… The hype cycle goes on, and eventually wears out as people find actual uses for the product category, and the limitations. At that point, the product type settles into the enterprise, or into obscurity.
Customer engagement has long benefited from data and analytics. Knowing more about each of your customers, their attributes, preferences, behaviors and patterns, is essential to fostering meaningful engagement with them. As technologies advance, and more of people’s lives are lived online, more and more data about customers is captured and made available. At face value, this is good; more data means better analytics, which means better understanding of customers and therefore more meaningful engagement. However, volumes of data measured in terabytes, petabytes, and beyond are so big they have spawned the terms “Big Data” and “Big Analytics.” At this scale, there are practical considerations that must be understood to successfully reap the benefits for customer engagement. This article will explore some of these considerations and provide some suggestions on how to address them.
C12G Labs has just announced an update release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of OpenNebula. OpenNebulaPro integrates the most recent stable version of OpenNebula (3.6) with the bug, performance, and scalability patches developed by the community and by C12G for its customers and partners.
OpenNebula 3.6 (codename Lagoon), released one month ago, featured several enhancements focused on making it a more robust and user friendly cloud manager. The main new feature is the new hotplugging mechanism for disk volumes that supports attaching either volatile volumes or existing images to a running VM. Also, Quota and Accounting tools were re-written from scratch , so now they are included in the OpenNebula core to enhance their integration with the existing AuthZ & AuthN mechanisms and other related tools (e.g. Sunstone). Some new features like VM rescheduling, hard reboots, or cloning of disk images were added as well. Apart from the core, Lagoon came with improvements in other systems, especially in Sunstone’s interface with the redesign of several tabs as well as in the OpenNebula Zones. There was also an important milestone reached in this release, with OpenNebula 3.6 fully integrated with the new OpenNebula Marketplace. Any user of an OpenNebula cloud can very easily find and deploy virtual appliances through familiar tools like the SunStone GUI or the OpenNebula CLI. The OpenNebula Marketplace is also of the interest of any software developer to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide.
