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Performance Cloud Computing: Yes You Can

The industry has long worried that cloud computing cannot deliver the performance required for critical enterprise applications. For example, the very notion of multiple compute instances or multiple applications sharing the same infrastructure has meant that service providers cannot guarantee service level agreements for response times. This has held many companies back from making the jump to the cloud. These performance bottlenecks are indicated in Figure 1. Multiple applications or virtual machines simply drive too much storage traffic to traditional disks, which cannot keep up with demands.

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Rackspace Starts the Great OpenStack Migration

Rackspace, which wants to be the “Linux of the cloud” mimicking the now billion-dollar-a-year Red Hat, said Monday that it’s “drawing a line in the sand against cloud providers.”
Everyone agrees it has Amazon, particularly, and VMware, to a certain extent, in mind. However, what’ll probably end up happening is that Red Hat, which has a prominent part in the open source OpenStack project that Rackspace started, becomes the “Linux of the cloud” because it’s got all the pieces, or thinks it does, but that’s another story.
Anyway, Rackspace is inching out with a production-ready OpenStack cloud based on Essex, the fifth and best-yet release of the open source cloud platform put in train by Rackspace and NASA in the summer of 2010.

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Rackspace Starts the Great OpenStack Migration

Rackspace, which wants to be the “Linux of the cloud” mimicking the now billion-dollar-a-year Red Hat, said Monday that it’s “drawing a line in the sand against cloud providers.”
Everyone agrees it has Amazon, particularly, and VMware, to a certain extent, in mind. However, what’ll probably end up happening is that Red Hat, which has a prominent part in the open source OpenStack project that Rackspace started, becomes the “Linux of the cloud” because it’s got all the pieces, or thinks it does, but that’s another story.
Anyway, Rackspace is inching out with a production-ready OpenStack cloud based on Essex, the fifth and best-yet release of the open source cloud platform put in train by Rackspace and NASA in the summer of 2010.

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Cloud computing, compliance, risk management

Avoid the Security Umpire Problem

Have you ever been part of a team or committee working on an initiative and found that the security or compliance person seemed to be holding up your project? They just seemed to find fault with anything and everything and just didn’t add much value to the initiative? If you are stuck with security staff that are like this all the time, that’s a bigger issue that’s not within the scope of this article to solve.  But, most of the time, it’s because this person was brought in very late in the project and a bunch of things have just been thrown at them, forcing them to make quick calls or decisions.

A common scenario is that people feel that there is no need to involve the security folks until after the team has come up with a solution.  Then the team pulls in the security or compliance folks to validate that the solution doesn’t go afoul of the organization’s security or compliance standards. Instead of a team member who can help with the security and compliance aspects of your project, you have ended up with an umpire.

Now think back to when you were a kid picking teams to play baseball.  If you had an odd number of kids then more than likely there would be one person left who would end up being the umpire. When you bring in the security or compliance team member late in the game, you may end up with someone that takes on the role of calling balls and strikes instead of being a contributing member of the team.

Avoid this situation by involving your Security and Compliance staff early on, when the team is being assembled.  Your security SMEs should be part of these conversations.  They should know the business and what the business requirements are.  They should be involved in the development of solutions.  They should know how to work within a team through the whole project lifecycle. Working this way ensures that the security SME has full context and is a respected member of the team, not a security umpire.

This is even more important when the initiative is related to virtualization or cloud. There are so many new things happening in this specific area that everyone on the team needs as much context, background, and lead time as possible so that they can work as a team to come up with solutions that make sense for the business.


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Cloud-Oriented Architecture and the Internet of Things

There are fundamental differences between data centers and the Internet of Things, which means that fundamental Cloud architecture principles must also transform to support this new reality. This transformation promises to be truly disruptive — a true paradigm shift as we figure out what it means to implement what we call Cloud-Oriented Architecture.
Quick quiz for all your Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist of resources in data centers, running one way or another on racks full of physical servers. But there’s nothing in the definition of Cloud that specifies anything about the physical location of Cloud resources.

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What Cloud Computing Really Means

Cloud computing is all the rage.
«It’s become the phrase du jour,» said Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring. The problem, according to InfoWorld, is that everyone seems to have a different definition of cloud computing.
Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing as an updated version of utility computing: virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is «in the cloud,» including conventional outsourcing, according to InfoWorld.
InfoWorld talked to dozens of vendors, analysts and IT customers on various components of cloud computing. Here is InfoWorld’s rough breakdown of what cloud computing is all about.

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Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting as a Service

This is a continuation of my series of articles on Industry SaaS. This term ‘Industry SaaS’ can be interchangeably used with BpaaS (Business Process as a Service). However, the term ‘Industry SaaS’ meaning a Software as a Service meant for a specific industry is stressed for wider attention, as the term BpaaS has yet to mature with a clear definition.
Business Planning and Forecasting refers to the set of activities where business is planned against the strategy and what forecast activities or results of the organization may occur from operational execution during a particular time period. The following are the functions of this business process.

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The Ever-Expanding Role of Big Data

“Security standards for moving data into and out of the cloud and for hosting it within the cloud will dramatically help accelerate adoption of the cloud as a secure computing platform,” observed Dr. William L. Bain, founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Bain also noted that “additional standards for creating elastic clusters that are physically co-located and use high speed networking will also help in hosting applications that analyze Big Data.”
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.»
Dr. William L. Bain: Agree. The cloud opens up huge opportunities for everything from cloud bursting to meet peak demand to hosting a scalable data analysis platform. This full range of use cases serves to enhance business agility.

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Looking “Inward” to the Private Cloud at Cloud Expo New York

As the use of public cloud resources has proven effective across a diverse set of use cases, organizations have begun looking inward to find ways to more effectively and efficiently use their existing compute, storage, and networking resources in a similar model.
This desire for internal resource utilization has given rise to numerous private and hybrid cloud technologies that provide tools for on-demand procurement of compute, storage, and networking resources above and beyond what was available previously in both classic and virtualized datacenters.

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Cyber Security in the Cloud: Trends, Challenges & Solutions at Cloud Expo

Information Security and Risk has become a top concern of IT organizations and consumers alike. Concern about inadequate Info Security remains the #1 obstacle to greater adoption of Cloud Computing, according to Intel’s research. The rapid growth of Mobile and IP-connected Embedded devices, Cloud Computing, Social Networks, and “Consumerization of IT” is being met with, and in some cases contributing to, an escalating number and complexity of Cyber-threats. Tenants of the cloud need the ability to assess security standards, trust security implementations, and prove infrastructure compliance to auditors.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Steve Orrin, Sr. Security Architect & Principal Engineer for the Cross Platform Technology group at Intel Corp., will describe the technologies and capabilities that provide reporting on the configuration of the virtual infrastructure used by the customer VMs and tie this to a verifiable measurement of trust in the hardware and hypervisor. This allows customers to be sure the provider is following security best practices, can pass a regulatory audit, and be assured that the provider’s platforms are booting from a secure root of trust, protected from root-kits and other malware. He will also describe the hardware and software methods by which these measurements, configuration of the virtual infrastructure, and events reported by the infrastructure are used to generate dynamic and detailed compliance reports and enforce security policies.

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