There is no longer any question that the cloud computing model will be the prevailing style of delivery for computing over the coming decades; Forrester Research predicts that the global market for cloud computing will grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020. Greenfield application development projects can be designed from the outset to benefit from cloud computing features such as elastic scalability, automated provisioning, infrastructure level APIs, object storage services and middleware services such as message queues and key/value stores. However, for existing legacy applications the journey to cloud is not quite so straightforward.
Understanding the impact of factors such as security/compliance, application architecture, integration, the pattern of demand and operational maturity is crucial when performing a cloud feasibility assessment. Additionally, many organizations perceive cost-reduction as one of the primary benefits of adopting a cloud hosting model. In practice however, this is not always an accurate assumption. There are nuances to the financial analysis: public cloud computing is not necessarily cheaper than traditional dedicated hosting. Furthermore, there are considerations around the impact on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), transformation/migration costs and the position of an organization with the IT life cycle.
Cloud and Managed Hosting provider, Pulsant, has announced it is helping technology integrators AppLayer transform its cloud services, by providing highly flexible managed hosting to support a new range of pre-packed Cloud solutions.
If the weekend IT press is to be believed, EMC are on the verge of acquiring solid-state array vendor XtremIO in a deal worth around $450 million. This would be a remarkable outcome for a company that is still technically “in stealth mode” and has no obvious revenue or customers.
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now only seven weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference…
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses…?
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now only seven weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference…
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses…?
Symform, the SETI-like cloud storage and backup start-up, has pulled down an $8 million B round led by WestRiver Capital, which now gets a board seat.
Existing investors OVP and Longworth Capital also kicked in. Symform is expecting to bring a strategic investor into this round at some point. It doesn’t know who yet but wants $3 million from whoever it is.
Three months ago Symform rounded out its $9 million A round when WestRiver first bellied up.
The B money will be used to finance the growth and global expansion of Symform’s Cloud Storage Network, now represented in 138 countries, up from 46 at the end of last year. The start-up says it’s seen 100% quarter-over-quarter growth in customer accounts, which are supposed to number in the thousands, and the number of devices on the Symform network and data files stored jumped 50% in the March quarter.
Using Amazon web services for elasticity and scale to build cloud applications.
Traditional IT environments that are built using physical servers can only scale and grow by buying new hardware and software and taking time to install and rack the hardware, configure the software and the application. If/when the excess capacity is not needed the servers stand idle consuming power, cooling and rackspace. This is inefficient and a waste of money.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows customers to scale using elastic demand. Just like a rubber elastic band stretches to accommodate more items , AWS provides elastic computing to allow a customer to scale up (or down); to grow or shrink their architecture quickly efficiently with minimal intervention.
The following is a summary of an AWS whitepaper and webinar that describes how you can use AWS to architect your system for the cloud.
Anybody who is considering a move to the Cloud knows that the greatest economic motivation for Cloud Computing is the pay-as-you-go, pay-for-what-you-need utility computing benefit, right? Deal with spikes in demand much more cost-effectively, the public Cloud service providers gush, since we can spread the load over many customers and pass the savings from our economies of scale on to you. The utility benefit is also a central premise of Private Clouds. Build a Private Cloud for your enterprise, the vendors promise, and you can achieve the same economies of scale as Public Clouds without all that risk.
Unfortunately, what sounds too good to be true usually is. There are a number of gotchas on both the Public and Private Cloud provider sides that limit—or even prevent—organizations from obtaining a full measure of the utility benefit. Let’s go back to economics class and take a closer look …
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements.
Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.
In a world of ever-increasing demand for performance vs cost, the importance of optimizing infrastructure utilization is critical. With today’s easy access to extremely high-performance hardware and the overabundance of management software, it is easy to “over subscribe” either accidentally or intentionally. Plenty of these discussions center around RAM and CPU, but what about storage and bandwidth and who is going to manage it all? There is a gentle yet optimal balance between performance, redundancy and capacity.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mike Carpenter, VP Business Development at CARI.net, will discuss how CARI.net utilizes efficient and powerful hardware along with both open source and proprietary software to achieve that ideal balance.
25th April 2012