One of the negative’s of cloud computing is it’s one-size-fits-all approach to infrastructure. A single load balancing system (and subsequently configuration) is considered acceptable for all applications. After all, it’s just about distributing requests, isn’t it?

Except it isn’t, and neither are myriad other infrastructure services that provide not only customized services for applications but additional benefits not currently offered by what are commoditized versions of functionality.

Even assuming an organization is using a fairly non-customized Load balancer, there is a disparity between the algorithms supported by the industry and those supported today by cloud computing providers. If you don’t think something as simple as the choice of a load balancing algorithm has an impact on availability and performance, think again. The reason there’s a list of more than six «industry standard» algorithms is the maturation of distribution algorithms over time. Different methods are better suited to specific types of applications and usage patterns, while those same algorithms are wholly unsuited for others. Determining the best algorithm is part of the process of deploying said solutions, and one that’s completely ignored by providers of cloud computing load balancing services.

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Innovations are commonly judged by how fast they reached 50 million users (Radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPod, 3 years, etc.). Another way to look at this is by time equivalents: If one Dog Year equals 7 human years than how many years of traditional IT do we travel in one Cloud Year?
This cloud year we saw quit a lot of change – also from existing mega vendors entering the cloud market – but did it match 7 years of progress in traditional IT (taking us roughly from SOA till today)? And do we really expect the next three years to bring as much change as we saw since the days of client-server or the next seven years to be the equivalent of the journey from the days of the mainframe to today?

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IBM is following in the recent footsteps of Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com and buying a cloud-based talent recruiting and management platform.
Its pick is Kenexa which also sells consulting. It’ll pay about $1.3 billion or $46 a share, a 42% premium to Kenexa’s close on Friday so you know the shares shot up to close the divide.
IBM says the acquisition will let organizations act on insights-driven analytics to create a smarter workforce across every line of business. It sees an “enormous opportunity” to apply advanced social business and analytics capabilities to front-line business operations and quotes CEO Ginni Rometty saying “organizations can think of Big Data as the next great natural resource.”

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For those of you keeping score, late last year American Airlines’ parent AMR declared bankruptcy. The Chapter 11 filing of the once largest airline in the world brought to a conclusion the era of disintegration for the legacy commercial airline market. You can argue about the principal cause for the airline industry’s demise, but ultimately it came down to the fact that the market leaders in the industry refused to adapt to the changes going on around it while others embraced it and found creative ways to rise to the top.

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Google’s top advertising customers are pushing for convergence of mobile and video quickly, which is turning into a strong catalyst of growth of the global mobile video market.  With their largest advertising customers wanting greater flexibility in bringing video to mobile devices, Google will make significant strides this year to make that happen.

During their latest earnings call, Google execs said that Android, Chrome and YouTube are the highest priority areas of their business. I’ve been following the last year of earnings calls closely, and it’s clear that Google’s largest advertising customers are pushing the company to bring video to mobile at a level of performance and usability not accomplished yet.  The Q2, 2012 earnings call transcript makes this point clear which can be accessed here Google’s Management Discusses Q2 2012 Results – Earnings Call Transcript.

 Mobile and Video: Transforming Convergence Into Cash

Over the last …

Cloud is a transformational shift in computing that can have a powerful effect on enterprise IT when designed correctly and used to its full potential. In his Day 3 Keynote at Cloud Expo New York, Citrix VP Sameer Dholakia discussed building, connecting and empowering users with cloud services and provided examples of how enterprises are solving real-world business challenges with an architecture and solution purpose-built for the cloud.
Sameer Dholakia is Group VP & GM, Cloud Platforms Group, at Citrix. He drives the company’s product strategy for cloud infrastructure and server virtualization. He joined the company in 2010, when Citrix acquired VMLogix, where he served as CEO. Dholakia brings extensive enterprise software experience to Citrix, having held key leadership roles in sales, business development and product management at companies such as Trilogy, Inc. He received his bachelor’s and master’s from Stanford University and a master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School.

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Will wonders never cease!
VMware, which – Cloud Foundry aside – doesn’t exactly have open source in its DNA, has asked to join the OpenStack Foundation – the consortium that wants nothing more than to take over VMware’s market share. And it’s willing to pay for the privilege, throwing its cloak of enterprise respectability over open source cloud platform.
Well, what is it they say? Hold your friends close and your enemies closer.
Where better to watch what OpenStack is up to than from inside?
It’s also a chance for Red Hat, a Platinum member since April and now one of the biggest OpenStack contributors, to watch its arch-enemy at closer quarters.

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The good news about the Big Data market is that we generally all agree on the definition of Big Data, which has come to be known as data that has volume, velocity and variety where businesses need to collect, store, manage and analyze in order to derive business value or otherwise known as the “4 V’s.” However, the problem with such a broad definition is that it can mean different things to different people once you start to put some real values next to those V’s.
Let’s be honest, Volume can be a different thing to different organizations. To some it is anything above 10 terabytes of managed data in their BI environment and to others it is petabyte scale and nothing less. Likewise velocity can be multi-billions of daily records coming into the enterprise from various external and internal networks. When it really comes down to it, each business situation will be quite different not only from a size and speed perspective but also more important from the business use-case or requirement. A large bank’s Big Data problem could be very different to that of an online retailer or an airline. If you compare what say a hospital is trying to do collecting and analyzing all the sensor patient data compared to a utilities provider running a smart-grid or a telecommunications operator. True, all could be categorized as machine generated or raw data but the exact type of data might be different not to mention the volume or growth rate. Probably the one unique common denominator across all aforementioned industries is that everyone is keeping the data for longer time-periods. No one is throwing it away – not even the detailed data.

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Rackspace has announced the unlimited availability of cloud databases and cloud servers powered by OpenStack, along with a powerful and streamlined new control panel.
These solutions further expand Rackspace’s broad cloud hosting portfolio, used today by more than 180,000 customers worldwide.
These products mark the first time a company deployed a large-scale, open source public cloud powered by OpenStack. Customers can now select from private, public or hybrid offerings and have the flexibility to deploy their solutions in a Rackspace data center or another data center of their choice.
Rackspace’s open cloud products also give application developers and IT organizations in businesses large and small the ability to build, test and deploy applications in the cloud for the first time without being locked-in.
The new Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack deliver increased efficiency, scalability and agility to customers, who can launch as many as 200 reliable cloud servers in 20 minutes.
Rackspace recently announced a celebration of the second anniversary of the OpenStack open-source cloud computing platform for building public or private clouds, according to an article on eWEEK.com.

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