I have been following Cloud Foundry from the day it got announced. It was very clear that VMware invested in it with a clear strategy – democratize PaaS by making it is absolutely easy for the hosters and enterprises to deploy it. Between 2008 and 2011, PaaS was associated with Google (App Engine), Microsoft (Windows Azure), Salesfore.com (Force.com / Heroku) and Engine Yard. But in the last one year, there are half-a-dozen new players that entered the niche PaaS market. And, one thing that is common among these new entrants is that all of them are powered by Cloud Foundry. Whether it is ActiveState, AppFog, Tier 3, Uhuru Software, PaaS.io or VMware’s own CloudFoundry.com, all of them use the same set of APIs and tools based on Cloud Foundry.
Apple Loses Chip Designer to AMD
AMD has poached the director of Apple’s mobile-focused Platform Architecture Group Jim Keller, credited with architecting several generations of the ARM-based chips found in the iPad, iPhone, iPod and Apple TV.
It will be Keller’s second go-round at AMD. He was there years ago working on the Athlon 64 and Opteron 64 processors that featured the world’s first native x86-64 bit architecture, a scheme Intel was forced to follow.
He also co-authored AMD’s HyperTransport specification and the x86-64 instruction set.
Should Cloud and Mobility Alter Your Approach to EA?
Farmville Farmers Outnumber Real Farmers — WHY?
Angry Birds passes one billion download –- WHY?
On 21st November, 2011, Kolaveri became the ‘most searched video’ on YouTube — WHY?
After two and a half year of near hibernation our Yammer usage suddenly took off without any internal promotion — WHY?
The answer is “we don’t know!“
Primary Storage Using the Cloud: Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
Back in April 2012, we published the results of our cloud storage survey to share customer insights into current and intended use cases for cloud storage. As expected, the results indicated that data protection and disaster recovery were among the top use cases. While the benefits of cloud storage around data protection and disaster recovery were further confirmed in our follow-up survey in June 2012, it was notable that our initial survey revealed over 48% of respondents used or planned to use cloud for primary storage. While we found this result eye-opening, the numbers may suggest to some that the glass is a bit more than half empty for primary storage users; we found it rather surprising that the glass is nearly half full.Is Primary Storage using the Cloud Becoming a Reality?
Rackspace Open Cloud Offers Scalable Computing
Rackspace on Wednesday announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, along with a powerful new Control Panel. These solutions, backed by Rackspace’s Fanatical Support, further expand Rackspace’s broad Cloud hosting portfolio, which is used today by over 180,000 customers worldwide.
Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace, stated: “We have delivered on our promise to implement OpenStack in our cloud offerings, and to free customers from the vendor lock-in that they face at other major cloud computing providers. We’re delivering open, high-performance, scalable and easy-to-use cloud solutions, while empowering customers to choose features, services, prices and locations based on the needs of their business.”
Total Defense Extends Cloud Security Protection for Businesses in Europe
Total Defense, Inc., a provider of solutions to combat the growing threat of cybercrime, today announced the launch of Total Defense Cloud Security, an integrated cloud based SaaS (Security as a Service) solution for Web and email protection, for businesses in Europe. This new offering provides organizations with a powerful and versatile Web and email security platform that protects users anytime and anywhere.
The widespread use of the Web as a business tool, coupled with an increasingly mobile workforce, has enhanced corporate productivity, but it has also created new security challenges for companies that must balance providing access with protecting critical corporate assets and data.
“The days of the typical business user accessing the Internet solely from the safety of a protected corporate network are over. Today’s workers are connecting from an array of different devices through a multitude of private and public networks, Wi-Fi hotspots and home networks. Traditional appliance-based Web and Email security solutions are unable to address the evolving security needs of modern businesses,” said Paul Lipman, CEO of Total Defense.
Singapore Gets New Cloud Center
The island-nation of Singapore, located in the southwest of the ASEAN region, competes with Hong Kong more than 1,500 miles to the northeast for business and attention. It is now also competing with the Chinese special administrative region (SAR) as an emerging cloud-computing center.
A recent development comes from Citic Telecom International CPC Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company that’s launched what it calls a SmartCloud center in Singapore. The center joins similar facilities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.
The company expects cloud services to grow to 20-25% of its overall business within three years, according to a statement from company CEO Stephen Ho.
This is a complex facility, belying any belief one might have that cloud is simple. It incorporates technology from Dell, Riverbed, VMware, and HP (which is adding security management into the mix).
The Riverbed technology, designed to optimize performance, is a key aspect of Citic’s implementation. A local Riverbed spokesperson said the company’s technology will address “the vagaries of the Internet” with the idea of maximizing QoS (quality-of-service) issues.
Citic says Singapore will be its “communications hub” for Southeast Asia, and also says it will extend its presence to Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the near future.
The Singaporean government has been an active supporter of cloud computing, encouraging investment and developing an aggressive government cloud program that provides XaaS cloud services to local businesses. A non-profit organization in Hong Kong called Asia Cloud developed a “Cloud Readiness Index” last year that aggregated several factors into an Asian ranking. Hong Kong slightly topped Singapore, followed closely by Australia.
I prefer to be in Manila for many reasons, and think there is potential for any of the large-to-massive cities of the region – Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok – to emerge more fully. Sydney and Melbourne are present in regional-hub discussions as well.
With Singapore as its communication hub for the ASEAN region, Citic plans to extend its presence to Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines in the near future. Apart from Singapore, it has deployed more than 50 points of presence already in the Greater China and Asia Pacific, including Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia.
Several network-security vendors are also involved with the project, including Certes Networks, Juniper Networks, Fortinet, and McAfee. The goal is to get Citic’s regional centers to work as disaster-recovery centers for one another.
Note that the technology vendors named here are all US Companies. Is anybody in Washington listening when we plead for them to pay more attention to the great and vast US cloud-computing innovation culture?
Speed Awareness Month Highlights Why Split Seconds Count on the Web
A consortium of web-performance industry companies today launched SpeedAwareness Month, a web-based educational program designed to help site owners learn about the importance of improving their website download speeds.
Speed Awareness month will run through the month of August 2012.
Research shows that many consumers will abandon a site if it takes longer than two seconds to load. Similarly, slow website speeds can impact search engine rankings, can increase pay-per-click advertising costs, reduce sales conversions and, in the end, decrease revenues.
Maximizing the performance of a website is as essential to site operators as having the right content and marketing program. On the Speed Awareness Month website, site owners can find regular blog posts, best practice recommendations, tutorials and free or trial services and tools they can use to boost website speed.
Speed Awareness Month is a collaborative effort organized by the following industry leading firms: Dyn Inc., MaxCDN,Panopta, Torbit, UberTags, StackExchange.com catchpoint.com and lognormal.com. More companies are expected to join the effort through the month.
Best practice and thought leadership content will come from the sponsors and more than 20 other industry thought leaders.
“I am very excited to see how many companies and experts are participating in Speed Awareness Month. We hope to reach as many website owners as possible and make them aware of the importance of website performance for their business,” said David Henzel, Speed Awareness Month organizer and vice president of marketing for NetDNA/MaxCDN. “The tips and free tools offered during this month will be a huge help for web masters to find out where the bottlenecks of their sites are and how to remove them.”
Speed Awareness Month is designed for all developers, system administrators, eCommerce shop owners and everyone that has a passion for website development and improvement.
The event is open to content from any experts who want to participate and have a passion or spread knowledge about web performance optimization. To contribute, contact David Henzel at dhenzel@netdna.com.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Maintain Ultimate Control of Cloud Backups
Convincing your clients to add cloud-based backups to their business continuity plan is often thwarted by a fear of losing control over offsite data. With an army of StorageCraft solutions empowering you to quickly access your data in multiple ways, you can easily convince your clients to add this wise level of protection.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Kimber Barton, Principle Sales Engineer at StorageCraft, will walks through offsite backup storage options, including StorageCraft Cloud Services, and the StorageCraft technologies that give you the power to maintain ultimate control over your offsite data.
Consumer cloud storage ever-present in the enterprise
The popularity of storage products such as Dropbox is infiltrating into enterprise as users go against company policy to utilise cloud-based storage.
According to a recent report from social business network Spiceworks, 33% of organisations said that their staff was using personal storage products.
The report, entitled ‘The Cloud Barometer’, aims to give insight into SMEs and their usage of cloud-based file sharing software. Spiceworks interviewed over 300 users across North America and the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) region.
The IT industry appears to have a mixed view on this acceleration, with 31% of companies surveyed agreeing that employees could use any provider they wished, yet 32% discouraged the behaviour.
Spiceworks noted that despite the accessibility, collaboration and convenience associated with cloud-based storage software, employers were still wary of the risks associated with file-sharing; evidently the type of data being shared and the usual bedbug, security.
Regarding specifics …