The latest Amazon outage again begs whether or not Amazon’s customers are technology leaders or laggards simply trying to reduce IT costs to their bare minimum. Certainly some enterprises are properly using the public cloud for key projects where a non-critical application or service needs to be created quickly and within a low budget.
Wrong strategy: 5 ways not to compete with Amazon AWS
These days, it seems that the whole world is gunning for Amazon.
Who can argue with the success of their on-line retail ventures, Kindle franchise, and of course AWS?
The secret to Amazon’s success is their ability to tune out the noise and focus on innovating, disrupting and creating new markets. Here’s five reasons how not to compete with Amazon AWS:
1) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
While Amazon’s competitors are busy building out their cloud infrastructure offerings, they are too closely aligned to Amazon’s vision and business model. Meanwhile, Amazon is innovating and disrupting their own market by offering new features while reducing costs.
Therefore, it seems that AWS is always one step ahead of the competition and thus customers continue to flock to their services. Rather than copy Amazon, competitors need to focus on innovation, features and benefits for the consumers of …
Dell to buy Quest Software: What does this mean?
For those not familiar with Quest, they are a software company not to be confused with the telephone communications company formerly known as Qwest (also known now as centurylink).
Both Dell and Quest have been on software related acquisition initiatives that past few years with Quest having purchased vKernel, Vizoncore (vRanger virtualization backup), BakBone (who had acquire Alavarii and Asempra) for traditional backup and data protection among others. Not to be out done, as well as purchasing Quest, Dell has also more recently bought Appassure (Disclosure: StorageIOblog site sponsor) for data protection, Sonicwall and Wyse in addition to some other recent purchases (ASAP, Boomi, Compellent, Exanet, EqualLogic, Force10, InsightOne, KACE, Ocarina, Perot, RNA and Scalent among others).
What does this mean?
Dell is expanding the scope of their business with more products (hardware, software), solution bundles, services and channel partnering opportunities Some of the software tools and focus areas that …
Sanbolic Provides SQL Server HA in the Public Cloud
“As a follow-up meeting from this year’s TechEd 2012 I had a briefing with Memo Michailov, Co-Founder and CEO of Sanbolic to discuss Sanbolic’s AppCluster’s new support for public clouds.
Cloud Privacy By Design and E-Discovery as a Service
As the Government’s own Digital Advantage paper recommends, the key to addressing Canada’s innovation gap is for CIO’s to adopt more new technologies like Cloud Computing, and the public sector can ignite this trend by leading the way with their own adoption.
Don Drummond makes a similar recommendation in his report. Recommendation 16-10 says: The government should shift its service delivery of information and information technology (I&IT) from in-house to external sources, where feasible.
AWS Outage Postmortum: “the generators did not pick up the load”
Amazon has provided their take on how the big derecho storm that hit the Eastern US (and still leaves millions without power during a heat wave) brought down one of their data centers. Basically it was “hardware failure” — in this case a couple of emergency generators.
In the single datacenter that did not successfully transfer to the generator backup, all servers continued to operate normally on Uninterruptable Power Supply (“UPS”) power. As onsite personnel worked to stabilize the primary and backup power generators, the UPS systems were depleting and servers began losing power at 8:04pm PDT.
Read the AWS statement for more detail.
ERP.com Named “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that ERP.com has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ERP.com is the authority site for enterprise resource planning (ERP). Members of ERP.com and visitors to the site can streamline their business software selection process by searching the comprehensive database of software solutions and ERP packages.
ERP.com also has in-house software implementation experts that can further help companies streamline their software selection process and if needed can install or update a chosen system. For most companies today, technology is a critical component for delivering the best performance and the mission of ERP.com is to help companies find the optimal software solutions at the lowest possible prices – free of charge.
Virtualization & Aggressive Cloud Computing Adoption Produce Big Benefits
The discussion examines the full implications of IT virtualization, and how accretive benefits are being realized — from bringing speed to business requests, to enhancing security, to strategic disaster recovery (DR), and to unprecedented agility in creating and exploiting applications and data delivery value.
If you look at SAP, you find literally thousands of development systems. You find a lot of training systems. You find systems that support sales activities for pre-sales. You find systems that support our consulting organization in developing customer solutions.
From a developer’s perspective, the first order of business is to get access to a system fast. Developers, by themselves, don’t care that much about cost. They want the system and they want it now. For development managers and management in general, it’s a different story.
For training, it’s important that the systems are reliable and available. Of course again for management, it’s the cost perspective. For people in custom development, they need the right system quickly to build up the correct environment for the particular project that they’re working on.
NuBlue on the Slick and Intuitive Parallels Plesk 11 Interface (Guest Blog)
NuBlue was established in 2005 and has quickly become a leading e-commerce hosting provider in the UK.
Since our inception we have used the Parallels Plesk control panel as no other product offers our customers the powerful and intuitive interface combination that Plesk allows. Our business has grown massively as Plesk has continued to evolve. With Plesk 11 it feels like the product has reached an evolutionary milestone.
Our team and our clients love the new interface, the speed of it, the slick and well organised feature set it provides. It just feels intuitive. Under the hood we are very excited by the possibilities of Nginx and SNI support as well as the myriad of performance enhancements that have been made, not to mention the out the box IPv6 support which stands us in good stead for our impending IPv6 rollout!
All in all we see this release of Plesk as the most exciting release yet and we can’t wait to introduce it to all our customers.
Tom Ashworth
Technical Director
The Four-Way Stop at the Cloud Security Crossroads
Cloud security is in a state of flux. Actually it’s not really, but discussion is rife across the industry regarding the general state of cloud data and application welfare. Questions flutter around whether particular services are secure, whether multi-tenant clouds can be locked down and whether “spun down” instances of cloud servers will remain secure so that old customer data is deleted and non-accessible.
Where are we headed with the general consensus on cloud security just now?
Of course we should start out from first principles and look to comments made the big name cloud providers who have pointed out that the cloud is only as secure as the controls you place upon it, i.e., virtualized hosting services do not come with “security included” as some sort of free gift… and so a cloud server is really just a server but delivered as a service.