Microsoft announced on June 7th that Windows Azure will be enhanced to include several infrastructure-as-a-service offerings including Windows Azure Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Web Sites and Media Services. These new offerings provide increased flexibility when planning your Private Cloud infrastructure through the introduction of Hybrid scenarios.
Windows Azure Virtual Machines provide the flexibility to inexpensively run Windows and Linux workloads with a variety of resource sizes (ie., Small, Medium, Large, XLarge VMs). In addition, the new Windows Azure Virtual Networking capabilities permit IT professionals to create secure site-to-site VPNs from their datacenters to the VMs they are running in the Azure cloud with no changes to underlying IP addressing. The resulting benefits provide the ability to quickly and securely extend your on-premises datacenter with elastic cloud resources while maintaining a single management toolset, Microsoft System Center, for managing both on-premises and cloud-based VM workloads. This flexibility is ideal for hybrid scenarios that involve the need for some application components to burst temporarily with additional compute resources or involve Internet-facing components that would otherwise be expensive and difficult for a business organization to host in-house.
Cloud Computing: Egenera Makes the Leap to Cloud Management
The way blade pioneer Egenera remembers things it invented converged infrastructure before it had to abandon its x86 BladeFrame servers, switches and storage for software based on its trusty Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager.
It is now making the obligatory move from other people’s virtualized blade servers to the private cloud still focused on blades.
Egenera has yet to make the great leap to rack servers. Blades, according to CEO Peter Manca, are more uniform and – although racks dominate – blades are faster growing.
Cloud Computing: Red Hat Recasts CloudForms as Hybrid Cloud Manager
Perhaps you will vaguely remember that a year ago CloudForms was supposed to be an infrastructure-as-a-service platform from Red Hat.
If you don’t it’s just as well because it’s not anymore.
It had to give way when Red Hat officially embraced OpenStack as an IaaS platform in April and became OpenStack’s single biggest contributor while it develops its own commercial OpenStack distribution.
That meant that Red Hat had to think up something else to do with CloudForms and so, when the widgetry hit GA Wednesday, it was recast as an open hybrid cloud management platform – largely, it appears, because it makes use of APIs in Deltacloud, the open source project Red Hat sent to live at Apache – that also happens to create hybrid IaaS resources in a corporate data center and on a public cloud like, say, Amazon or VMware
Cloud Cruiser Announces Availability of Cloud Cost Intelligence Solution
Cloud Cruiser’s new software products provide cost transparency, chargeback, and business intelligence analytics.
Cloud Cruiser announced at HP Discover in Las Vegas this week the general release of two new cloud cost intelligence solutions for HP CloudSystem.
The new software products integrate Cloud Cruiser’s cost analytics platform with HP CloudSystem Matrix, CloudSystem Enterprise, and Cloud Service Automation to provide cost transparency, chargeback, and business intelligence (BI) analytics for provisioned resources.
Guest post: Migrating applications to the cloud
8th June 2012
Security, compliance, and automation are top of the priority list for executives trying to plot their journey to the cloud. But how does one cut through all the ‘Cloud Clutter’ to identify key insights, trends, and prescriptive guidance for successfully migrate their current business applications to the cloud? Flexera Software’s Jeanne Morain explains.
Building Killer Apps with Big Data
One thing that gets lost in the general Big Data hubbub is the critical question of apps. Big Data can provide stunning business insights but unless those insights are embodied into an application that can galvanize new business behaviors they are not worth much.
VMware has been a thought leader in the area of cloud application platforms for some time. Now we are turning our attention to the intersection of Big Data and Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing – Is Everything Old Really New Again?
Service Providers large and small have been delivering network-based services for decades, including infrastructure and software. These have come in the form of enterprise hosting, unified communications, managed security, and managed applications. In fact, it’s not a stretch to include traditional telecommunications services such as Voice, MPLS, and Internet access into a discussion on traditional network services, since networks are shared. Over years of delivering these services, technological advances have taken place, many without interesting names or marketing budgets tied to them.
Enter the newest headline-grabbing network service – “Cloud.” It seems the market still has differing opinions on how to define Cloud. I have heard professionals blur the lines by referring to Cloud as anything in the network, or by lumping it in with services such as managed hosting. Purists call it self-service and unmanaged. There are even sub-categories, such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, where even the lines between these blur. Even though there isn’t consensus on the perfect definition of Cloud, there is agreement that something important is happening.Is the Cloud New?
The Cloud Impact and Adoption Infographic
Maybe you’ve noticed but I’ve been on an infographic kick lately – especially when it’s something interesting.
This time it is an aggregated infographic of data primarily from Forrester, IDC and Gartner as it pertains to the cloud’s impact and adoption thru 2015.
According to Axway, the cloud is expected to become the primary operating system for enterprise by 2014, mobile devices are driving adoption, and the cloud hype is over, this thing is for real.
CCID Consulting: IDC Operators to Lead Industry Development
By the end of 2011, the world held a total of 3.72 million data centers, and more than half of them were located in US and Europe. On the whole, the Central and Eastern Europe, part of Asia-Pacific, North America and West Europe ranked high, but their room for further increase is limited, with a compound annual growth rate of 3.8% during the past three years. By contrast, emerging markets such as Asia-Pacific and Africa that have seen a compound growth rate as high as 14.2% will be the biggest drive for the growth of the whole industry.
Opstera’s AzureOps Improves Application Management on Windows Azure
announced an updated version of its AzureOps service. AzureOps now allows customers to compose, monitor, and manage disparate cloud services as a single unified cloud application. These services include Azure infrastructure (IaaS) and platform services (PaaS), as well as third party software as a service (SaaS) offerings such as email, messaging, and web analytics. Opstera’s new service improves health management for cloud applications through intuitive dashboards, threshold-based analytics, and configurable alerts, allowing IT managers to quickly make informed decisions to optimize performance and minimize costs.