10th May 2012
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is deploying Microsoft’s Hyper- V private cloud platform, to help deliver improved services for desktop PCs and unified communication and collaboration across its entire IT estate.
Cloud Expo Keynote: The Era of Open Clouds Is Upon Us
Last year, cloud computing pundits predicted that 2012 would be the year when the clouds would open. They were right as cloud computing enthusiasts all over are embracing the open ecosystem; however, denying one vendor the right to serve as the de facto API is only the tip of the iceberg of this computing climate change.
In his Day 3 Keynote at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, will discuss the open ecosystem and how, ultimately, winning cloud technologies will be based on the ecosystem they represent.
Gartner predicts the personal cloud will quickly eclipse the PC
A report from Gartner has indicated that the personal cloud will overshadow the PC as the main element of consumers’ digital lives by 2014.
The IT analysts claim the rapid growth in the usage of apps has led to this verdict, meaning a sea-change in how consumers stream, share and synchronise content providing more flexibility, user satisfaction and productivity with the cloud.
Michael Gartenberg, research director at Gartner and co-author of the report, said: “The personal cloud isn’t a single offering, but a reflection of consumers’ expectation that their content will flow seamlessly as the result of a combination of services that overlap the consumer, business and government domains.”
The report stated that, as no company has complete dominance of the field, “the stakes are high” – in essence, the competition will only improve the services currently available.
An example here is that, with the release of Google’s personal …
End-to-End Cloud Offerings for Large Enterprises
With cloud adoption becoming a de-facto option for small and medium enterprises, large enterprises are relatively slower in their adoption of cloud. The main reason is that large enterprises have a very complex existing IT setup and no single offering from various cloud providers has yet to satisfy all their needs.
However we find the recent announcements and offerings from IBM provide a perfect platform for large enterprises to on board to Cloud to make their businesses more agile.
The below reference architecture provides an overview of how the large enterprises would like to position their cloud-enabled IT so that they get best of their traditional operations while merging with the benefits of cloud.
Dome9 Security Enables Secure Cloud Computing with HP Cloud Services
“We are very pleased to build the next generation of secure cloud computing with HP Cloud Services, and to be the first vendor to manage HP Cloud Security Group policies leveraging the OpenStack API,” commented Dave Meizlik, Dome9 VP of Marketing and Business Development, as Dome9 Security announced on Thursday that its cloud security service supports HP Cloud Services.
Under an agreement with HP, Dome9’s cloud security service integrates with HP Cloud Services out-of-the-box. The two services offer integration via an agent or API, for flexibility and ease of use for cloud security. Customers simply enter their HP Cloud Services API key or install the lightweight Dome9 agent. Dome9 automatically connects to HP Cloud Services and begins managing the cloud server security, providing policy-based automation to secure an infinite number of servers with highly elastic controls.
Notes on Big Data
Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator that is being used to find the elusive “God particle” generates about 40Terabytes (1 TB=103GB) of data per day from its four main detectors. Assuming an average size of 1GB for a movie, that amounts to a data stream worth 40000 movies(!) in a day. This massive amount of data is distributed to selected institutions across the world for further research. Thus, in one year, the CERN pumps about 15 Petabytes(1PB=106GB) of data into its private network and the Internet. Similarly, multiple information sources across the world are generating data so large as to challenge the technology that stores and processes that data. To put things in a broader perspective, 90% of the world’s data was created in the last 2 years!
This Week in Cloud
Can Google Apps unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange? This CIO article shares insight from the CIO of New England Biolabs, which recently conducted proof-of-concept testing with Google Apps for Business. While New England Biolabs decided to stick with its Outlook/Exchange Server set-up and plans to transition to a hybrid solution that adds the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365, the article also highlights why organizations should consider Google Apps.
BigDataExpo Official Twitter Page Named As Top 50 Twitter Influencer
In a list aimed at identifying who to follow on Twitter for “the latest trends, news and opinions” on Big Data, as well as to identify the figures shaping the discussion and the evolution of field, SAP has included the official BigDataExpo Twitter page (@BigDataExpo.com). The list was determined by tweet topics, number of followers, number of tweets, and influence as calculated by Klout, a web service that uses Hadoop to measure influence online.
TwinStrata Announces Immediate Support for HP Cloud Services
“Organizations who seek to migrate elements of their infrastructure to the cloud often find backup, archival and disaster recovery to be ideal applications,” said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO at TwinStrata, as TwinStrata today announced immediate support for HP Cloud Services through its CloudArray storage gateway.
Is Google Drive Too Late to the Party?
Like many people, the other week I downloaded and installed Google Drive. This is the long-awaited competitor to services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, offering free online storage with the ability to upgrade to higher capacity at a cost. Dropbox and the various other lookalikes have been around for some time, so is Google coming to this market too late and is the party already over?
The concept of Cloud Storage is pretty simple. Services like Dropbox allow you to share a local folder on your PC or Mac and have that data replicated into “the cloud”. From there it can be accessed by other devices, including smartphones, web browsers and tablets. The great benefit of cloud storage offerings is that they allow all copies of data to be kept in sync, while retaining a backup copy that can be used if any or all of the local device copies are lost or corrupted.