“The recent TOSCA initiative has made interoperability for cloud computing closer than ever,” observed Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “However, until players like Amazon and Google join in,” Hillier continued, “it will be difficult for organizations to move from one cloud to the other without risks to their data and infrastructure.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or disagree? – “While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility.”
Andrew Hillier: Although savings and agility are both compelling benefits, it’s usually agility that’s realized first. This isn’t because it is a higher priority, but because it occurs earlier in the cloud adoption process. The push toward standardization and self-service can rapidly increase flexibility and decrease provisioning time, but can actually work against efficiency (much to the surprise of many cloud adopters). The resulting environments are difficult to manage, and many organizations end up with higher spend (for external clouds) or much lower density (internal clouds) than they originally envisioned. Fortunately, by adopting more sophisticated methods of planning and controlling these environments, workload placements and resource allocations can be safely optimized, eliminating over-provisioning once and for all and turning the cloud adoption process into the “win-win” that was originally targeted.

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NAB kept me totally away from all the interesting online discussions last week. It’s too late to respond to @JoinToigo’s tweet (we’d call this Figs after Easter in Dutch), but I thought I’d share my thoughts in a bit more than 140 characters.
The short answer is no … but a better answer is very much *yes*.
The first file systems were not designed with the thought of petabytes of data. I don’t know what the exact projections were back then, but gigabytes must have sounded pretty sci-fi. Bytes and kilobytes were a lot more common. We didn’t think that we’d soon all be creating tens if not hundreds of multi-megabyte files per day.
File systems have of course evolved a lot and some have become so popular you could actually say they have a fan base (I’d need to do research on ZFS fan clubs). It is clear that the file system has played a very important role in the evolution of the computer industry. In my list of features that helped to make computers a commodity, the file system would probably be in the top three (with the windows-style GUI and the mouse). The file system enables the use of directories, which have been the most important tool to keep our data organized.

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With the enablement of new sources of data flow into the enterprise, it is time to look at the issues of Information Delivery 1.0 of the current enterprises.
Disparate Data Sources, most enterprises have grown multiple database platforms and even within a platform, multiple databases for various reasons. Enterprises taking a lot of pain and effort on ETL towards synchronizing the data.
Enterprises are slowly incorporating big data, unstructured data in their information delivery scope, but don’t have clear means to integrate them.
Rich Media content (audio, video, music and other binary content) are finding their place, but the real context of that content is identified more by the metadata and not by the content.

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In the name of its Hadoop-based Big Data platform, IBM is buying Carnegie Mellon spin-off and enterprise search house Vivisimo on undisclosed terms.
The Pittsburgh ISV, which has its own search and navigation system, is supposed to be good at “capturing and delivering quality information across the broadest range of data sources, no matter what format it is, or where it resides,” providing a “single view across the enterprise.” It’s all automated and can be used standalone or embedded.
Vivisimo saw all of $5.66 million in funding from 2000 through 2008 according to CrunchBase, including a $4 million A round led by North Atlantic Capital.

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The fastest and most flexible way to move server applications to any cloud, appzero took a market-setting step forward today with the release of zapp cloud migration. This technology extracts Windows server applications from production environments and packages them for movement to any cloud, without re-engineering, change, or lock-in.
Applications packaged by zapp can be copied and run on any cloud or data center server with the ease of an enterprise app store. This capability is well suited to hybrid/federated cloud scenarios in which enterprise workloads are moved on premise or to clouds in response to business requirements.
For use cases that call for ease of application on-boarding with no further planned movement, appzero also offers a dissolve function. Upon deployment, dissolve removes the appzero packaging, installing the application to the OS.

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SingleHop, an IaaS and cloud computing concern started in 2006, has gotten its first institutional financing, a $27.5 million round led by Battery Ventures. American Chartered Bank also participated in the round.
Battery’s general partner Dave Tabors along with Morad Elhafed will be joining the SingleHop board.
CEO Zak Boca claims SingleHop’s “business is unique in the hosting industry because all of our services are provided through our proprietary and fully automated platform. This gives us great operational advantages, and with the growing demand for hybrid solutions, it also positions us very well to offer a unified experience to our clients.”

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