It’s April in Vancouver, which got me thinking about clouds. Although the IT buzz in 2012 has been dominated by mobile and big data, Cloud computing is still a hot topic, especially since it is an enabler for both. In the public Cloud space, Google just launched Drive.
Canadian Cloud 2.0, From Cisco
This week I published our latest Cloud Best Practices white paper, called ‘Microsoft Cloud 2.0‘. The main activity of the CBPN is this vendor matching, i.e. we identify the best practice model, and then describe how different vendors can be used to implement those models. In this case Cloud 2.0 mapped on to the Microsoft […]
Google Street View Wi-Fi Snooping: Commentary
On Saturday, April 28, the FCC released the full un-redacted report on Google’s Street View project. The report is only 25 pages long and can be found at the bottom of this post. I find the following tidbits particularly interesting: “ …Engineer Doe developed Wi-Fi data collection software code that, in addition to collecting Wi-Fi network […]
How to Monetize the OpenStack Wave
After OpenStack was announced at OSCON in the summer of 2010, the degree of momentum behind this new open source platform has been nothing short of spectacular. Startups and enterprises alike have placed their strategic bets to monetize the OpenStack wave in various ways. As an ecosystem insider and one of the founding sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation, I wanted to offer my views on how various organizations are looking to skin this cat.
I’d like to focus on three of the many efforts currently underway. These three, in particular, happen to be the most vocal about their position and represent three distinct strategy camps. They are Nebula with its OpenStack appliance; Piston with its PentOS cloud operating system; and Dell’s Crowbar, an OpenStack installer.
Industry Dynamics of Online Storage and the Decade Ahead
Guest Post by Eric Greenwood
Eric Greenwood is a technophile whose interests have led him to study all things related to the cloud computing movement from online storage to software as a service. Get more tips and advice on his Cloud Computing blog.
Online, or cloud storage, is a massively growing industry, already poised to change the way we use our computers. By 2016, consumers are predicted to be spending as much $16 billion on cloud storage annually.
Big names are flying into the cloud. Oracle and Hewlett Packard are rushing to sell cloud computing tools; Amazon’s cloud services division has earned an estimated $750 million from cloud services in 2011 – and predictions are for earnings of $2.5 billion by 2014 from all cloud services including their Simple Storage Service. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos suggests potential for Amazon Web Services could surge to match that of its retail earnings, which last year topped $25 billion. Rackspace’s cloud servicing is also surging.
While currently only approximately 10% of global spending IT goes to cloud computing, the shift to cloud storage is a growing trend and market.
Popular cloud storage service Dropbox already has over fifty million users, and $250 million in venture capital; and Google Drive’s new online storage is poised to rival them. Like Dropbox’s chief competitor, Sugar Sync, Drive offers 5 GB of free storage, over doubling the free storage amount provided by Dropbox.
Storage competitors are also likely to follow Dropbox’s option of gallery pages that allow users who follow a link to see photos, presentations and videos without downloading each individual file. Dropbox is valued at approximately $4 billion, currently. The company’s CEO recently turned down a reported nine-figure offer from Apple. Apple of course maintains its own online storage system, iCloud, free to all users of iOs5. iCloud’s seamless interface with Apple products keeps this cloud storage service somewhat above the competitive fray.
Dropbox was recently voted “startup of the year,” and is reportedly the fifth most valuable web start-up, globally. But along with iCloud, SugarSync, and Google’s new drive, competition is fierce from other online storage startups ranging from Box.net, now known simply as Box, to Microsoft’s massive SkyDrive, Carbonite, which offers solid data backup services, and SpiderOak, which offers data encryption. Each of these cloud storage companies have greatly benefitted from the decline in pricing for online storage. Clearwell Systems research estimates that the storage cost for 1 gigabyte of information that cost $20 in 2000 is now approximately ten cents. HTML 5 has also greatly accelerated the growth of cloud storage companies. The cost and technology trends that have made cloud computing expand will only accelerate over the next ten years.
Dropbox’s popular rival SugarSync is an outgrowth of Sharpcast, the 2006 creator behind Sharpcast Photos, utilized for synching photo images to multiple devices. SugarSync’s differentiation with its competitors is based on its use of an automated refreshing process which means users don’t need to update their own synced files.
Microsoft’s recent overhaul of its SkyDrive online storage has doubled the storage file limit size, and made sharing as well as file management simpler for users. Just last month, Microsoft released a desktop app for SkyDrive, and allows direct file sharing to Twitter.
On the downside, there may only be a finite amount of users willing to store their data in the cloud, and a lot of competitors vying for a slice of the same pie. What’s good for consumers in terms of free storage or service perks may be difficult to sustain an entire industry of cloud storage competitors. Consolidation of some companies may be necessary.
A recent cautionary note was also founded when the file storage and hosting business Megapuload in Hong Kong was shut down by the U.S. Justice department for assisting in the violation of U.S. copyrights due to the ability of users to upload copyrighted material and distribute a link to it.
Megaupload’s violations bring up a key point in cloud storage, leading to the question as to whether or not Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, and all their competitors must scan files for copyright violations. Should this occur, the market will likely improve for Google with its Content ID already in place. Privacy and trust issues are also key in cloud storage growth. The only online storage company that claims to be unable to view users’ stored data is SpiderOak.
Online storage may be still in a speculative stage, but with data volumes predicted to multiply over forty times by the year 2020, data storage in one form or another is not only here to stay, it’s here to grow. Publicly traded companies such as EMC Corporation, NetApp, Isilon, Amazon, and CSC are providing expanded cloud storage options, and growing in financial leaps and bounds. IBM is working on a cloud system that can create virtual machines, able to integrate data without the costs of standard IT development, and simplifying cloud resources.
Complete data management through the cloud is clearly coming in the near future. Personal computer users and businesses multi-national to mom and pop size, must address data storage. Cloud storage is the go-to storage of the future, protected from human error, disasters, theft, and hardware malfunctions.
Cloud Computing in Higher Education
The irony about cloud computing in the higher education environment is that most schools have already been using it to some extent but may not even realize it.
Gmail is one example. Yahoo Mail is another. The fact is web-based applications, which many schools rely on for daily communication, don’t always register with most people as being part of the cloud computing trend. But they are, given that they essentially fit the layman’s rudimentary explanation of the cloud: where storage and computing capacity exist (provided by a vendor) so all that is needed on a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone is a browser. There are more “technical details” to actual cloud infrastructure, platforms and delivery, but for the purposes here, we will stick with the basic view.
There’s no question that cloud computing usage has exploded and will continue unabated. An article in the September 30, 2011 issue of Campus Technology stated that a new industry forecast is predicting that cloud computing will account for 33 percent of all data center traffic by 2015 – tripling the current percentage and about 12 times the total current volume.
Best Practices for Growing your VPS and Cloud Server Business
Parallels recently published a case study looking at how leading Australian web hosting provider, Net Logistics, was able to create new revenue opportunities through Virtual Private Servers (VPS) offerings. In the case study, Net Logistics Business Development Manager, Joseph Salim, described how it took just three years to go from no VPS offerings to VPS accounting for 40% of their customer base. Today, 60% of all new customers buy VPS from Net Logistics.
The demand for Virtual Private Servers continues to explode, and can include everything from a single VPS to elastic, hourly-billed cloud infrastructure. Deploying cost effective VPS and cloud server solutions is the key to accelerating revenue and realizing profit. In our upcoming webinar on May 9, the focus is on growing your VPS and cloud server business. Lowell Anderson, Parallels Director of IaaS Product Marketing, will share the results of our latest market research and the best practices to optimize your cost structure and drive profits from your VPS solutions. Liam Eagle, Editor in Chief of Web Host Industry Review (The WHIR), , will moderate the discussion through a range of topics including market survey results describing VPS revenue opportunities, buyer preferences and what drives purchasing for VPS services, best practices for profiting from VPS services and how to plan for the future.
Would you like to find out how your business can capitalize on this market opportunity by offering VPS to your customers? Please join us May 9, 2012 at 11am-12pm Pacific, 2pm-3pm Eastern for our Best Practices for Growing your VPS and Cloud Server Business webinar.
To register or invite customers to attend, click here.
Release of OpenNebula 3.4.1
The OpenNebula project has just announced the general availability of OpenNebula 3.4.1. This is a maintenance release that fixes bugs reported by the community and includes new languages for Sunstone and the Self-Service portals. OpenNebula 3.4 (Wild Duck) was released three weeks ago bringing countless valuable contributions by many members of our community, and specially from Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University.
OpenNebula 3.4 incorporated support for multiple Datastores that provides extreme flexibility in planning the storage backend and important performance benefits, such as balancing I/O operations, defining different SLA policies and features for different VM types or users, or easily scaling the cloud storage. Additionally, OpenNebula 3.4 also featured improvements in other areas like support for clusters (resource pools), new tree-like menus for Sunstone, or the addition of the Elastic IP calls in the EC2 Query API.
Cloud Expo New York: The Growing Big Data Tools Landscape
Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best – and most cost-effective – for their organization.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, David Lucas, Chief Strategy Officer at GCE, will run through what enterprises really need to know about the growing set of big data tools – including those being leveraged by organizations today as well as the new and innovative tools just arriving on the scene. He will also help attendees gain greater insight on how to match the right data center tools to a specific enterprise challenge and what processes need to change to handle big data.
An IT Forecast: Where Cloud, Mobile and Data Are Taking Us
A thorough piece on CNET by Gordon Haff looks at the interconnectivity of cloud computing, mobility and Big Data, and sees these three forces as instrumental in shaping the future of IT.
“Through the lens of next-generation IT, think of cloud computing as being about trends in computer architectures, how applications are loaded onto those systems and made to do useful work, how servers communicate with each other and with the outside world, and how administrators manage and provide access,” Haff writes.
He says the trend also covers the infrastructure and plumbing that make it possible to effectively coordinate data centers full of systems increasingly working as a unified compute resource as opposed to islands of specialized capacity.
Computing is constantly evolving. What makes today particularly interesting is that “we seem to be in the midst of convergent trends of a certain momentum and maturity to reinforce each other in significant ways. That’s what is happening with cloud computing, mobility and Big Data,” Heff writes.