Small to large companies are all seeking additional knowledge in this growing sector of Cloud Computing. From storage, work share, document management to full enterprise solutions for business. Consulting groups are seeking just that kind of full service providers. Providing business point solutions without having to buy a different application to fulfill that need is proving to be very cost effective and reduces the pains on IT management.
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Cloud Computing Consulting - New Level of Technology Consulting
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Lightning Downs Amazon and Microsoft Clouds
Its data center in Dublin was downed by a lightning strike Sunday night
So was Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) but Amazon was still struggling to re-inflate its cloud Monday and had warned that some EC2 users could be down 48 hours and counting before everything gets put back together again. Microsoft seemed to crawl back in a few hours.
Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) was also hit.
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Cloud Computing Provider Logicworks Selects ScienceLogic IT Management
Service provider Logicworks has chosen the ScienceLogic Inc. EM7 IT operations and cloud management platform to provide its enterprise managed hosting customer base with advanced monitoring options. New York-based Logicworks provides enterprise managed hosting and managed cloud solutions for mission-critical applications and content for clients including Dow Jones, Starwood Hotels, Radar Online, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
The Logicworks Network Response Team and Operations Center engineers will be the main users of ScienceLogic EM7, which will provide a 24/7 view into how they are providing services to end customers. EM7 will also automate the provisioning of monitoring services for the Logicworks infiniCloud public cloud offering as well as Logicworks' private cloud and enterprise managed hosting services. Logicworks Managed Database Services for hosted Oracle, MySQL, and MS SQL Server will also be enhanced by ScienceLogic EM7.
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Linux Labs Completed Development for HPC Cloud Computing Service
Searchlight Solutions Ltd. on Tuesday announced its subsidiary, Linux Labs International, Inc., has recently completed a key upgrade of its proprietary NimbusOS for use as the Operating System for its High Performance Cloud Computing ("HPC2") service. Linux Labs NimbusOS was developed to be compatible and configurable for almost all HPC applications.
This recently finalized upgrade is an important milestone in preparing for the formal launch of the Company's HPC2 Service. The modified NimbusOS will run the servers that will allow customers to run their HPC applications.
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BMC Software Announced Cloud Operations Capabilities to Safeguard Cloud Users
BMC Software on Tuesday announced additional capabilities integrated into its BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution that proactively ensures the service quality of cloud services and avoids many of the risks of cloud computing such as outages, performance and capacity issues, while simplifying cloud administration.
The costly aftershock associated with recent cloud failures has shifted the focus of many companies toward cloud management solutions that safeguard against potential incidents and outages. Industry analysts have been clear about the requirements necessary for successful cloud operations.
BMC provides enterprises and service providers with the cloud operations capabilities required to support the day-to-day business of running a cloud and meet the expectations of cloud users. Taking a preventative approach, BMC helps avoid cloud failures through the smart management of performance and capacity issues. The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution ensures that, on the first day, cloud services are provisioned and placed according to configurable policy. Once provisioned, on “Day 2” and beyond, BMC’s cloud operations solutions ensure the performance of cloud services consistently meet expectations.
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Adaptive Computing Delivers Dynamic Cloud with New Moab Advancements
Adaptive Computing, a provider of cloud systems management and Optimized Dynamic Cloud solutions, today announced that IT management and their staff no longer need to accept static cloud environments. The latest release of Moab Adaptive Computing Suite 6.1, a cloud decision engine, features extended dynamic cloud capabilities, accelerates workload management processes, maps and manages service component relationships to improve reliability and consolidates cloud event reporting. Enhanced dynamic cloud management capabilities in Moab allow IT departments to deliver applications, expand resources and keep services running optimally, all at the speed of business.
Adaptive Computing’s cloud solutions address growing demand to rapidly deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) up to Applications-as-a-Service (AaaS). Currently IT lacks the ability to intelligently manage infrastructure due to restrictive manual processes, which result in a static environment. With Moab Adaptive Computing Suite 6.1, IT infrastructure is automatically managed, creating a dynamic cloud environment that performs at the speed of business.
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Intel to Invest $30M in the Future of Cloud
Intel Labs on Wednesday announced two new Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTC) hosted at Carnegie Mellon University focused on cloud and embedded computing research. Intel to invest $30M in the new centers over five years, part of its larger $100M program designed to increase university research and accelerate innovation. Intel invites academic researchers to submit their ideas to become a funded ISTC in 2012.
Aimed at shaping the future of cloud computing and how increasing numbers of everyday devices will add computing capabilities, Intel Labs announced the latest Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTC) both headquartered at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Open Cloud Initiative Revived
After a couple of false starts over the last couple of years, the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) has been resurrected to advocate for royalty-free open standards in cloud computing with a set of Open Cloud Principles (OCP) that are unlikely to be universally accepted.
It says its purpose is “to provide a legal framework within which the greater cloud computing community of users and providers can reach consensus on a set of requirements for Open Cloud, as described in the document, and then apply those requirements to cloud computing products and services, again by way of community consensus.”
There will be a 30-day comment period on the Open Cloud Principles, which are described as focused on “interoperability, avoiding barriers to entry or exit and ensuring technological neutrality.”
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RentTheCloud.com Debuts to Help CIOs Adopt Cloud Computing
A-Frame Technology Services on Thursday announced the availability of RentTheCloud.com, a brokerage service that matches companies seeking cloud services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) with cloud vendors. Unlike the uncertainties and risks of conventional approaches to evaluating, selecting, and implementing a cloud service, RentTheCloud.com is 100% success-based, like a realtor. Fees are based on a "cloud brokerage agreement" modeled after a standard realtor agreement and equal to one or two months of the cloud rental fee.
The RentTheCloud.com website currently lists the profiles of more than 100 cloud vendors, like a realty website lists properties. IT executives can quickly search the market of quality cloud properties for their unique needs and IT environments.
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SoftLayer Has Record-Setting Second Quarter
SoftLayer Technologies on Tuesday announced that the company experienced continued operational and financial growth in the second quarter of 2011, hitting all new records. Along with other achievements, the company earned $83 million in revenue for the period.
“This has been the greatest quarter of growth in our history,” said Lance Crosby, Chief Executive Officer for SoftLayer. “From the innovations we bring to market to our corporate performance and beyond, SoftLayer believes in setting challenging goals and then working harder than belief to attain them. I’m exceptionally proud of the effort from all levels and functions across our company.”
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Arizona Charter School Moving to the Cloud
Not just any kind of web portal, the creators VICO Systems LLC, develop a very customized portal called the VICO iSchool(tm) Parent / Guardian webportal.
The immediate benefit to the users, it provides a single location to access all of the schools communications, resources, and services. This allows parents to stay better informed with communications, manage tasks, purchase goods and services directly through a secure shopping cart, enroll in school programs, and visit a current calendar of events.
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FedPlatform.org Focuses on a Government PaaS
With GSA now issuing ATOs and Amazon launching its own government specific cloud, IaaS for government agencies is now a reality. This next step in this "Cloud First" march is a consistent platform on which agencies can securely develop their applications.
To focus on this requirement, FedPlatform.org has been formed as a collaborative initiative to help federal organizations safely learn about and evaluate PaaS technologies. The initiative supports the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy and the Federal CIO’s 25-Point Federal IT Reform Plan, which suggests that cloud technologies provide new efficiencies and substantial cost savings. The FedPlatform.org mission is to facilitate implementations that adhere to rapidly evolving cloud computing standards, with a heavy focus on interoperability, portability and security.
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SoftLayer Ranked One of Dallas’ Five Fastest Growing Tech Firms
SoftLayer Technologies, a provider of Cloud, Dedicated, and Managed hosting on Thursday announced that the company has been ranked on the Metroplex Technology Business Council (MTBC) Fast Tech List as one of the five fastest growing tech companies in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Final rankings will be announced at the MTBC’s Tech Titans Awards Gala to be held August 26 at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas. SoftLayer is a title sponsor of the event, and Duke Skarda, SoftLayer Chief Technology Officer, will present opening and closing remarks.
“SoftLayer is honored to have qualified for this award,” said Lance Crosby, SoftLayer Chief Executive Officer. “We are proud to contribute to Dallas’ vibrant technology community. Ceremonies such as the Tech Titans Gala showcase the tangible contributions made each year by the technology industry to the North Texas economy and community.”
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Microsoft Cuts Cloud Deal with Chinese Linux Outfit
Microsoft turned up Monday in Beijing with a cloud pact with leading Chinese Linux provider China Standard Software Co Ltd (CS2C).
They’re supposed to co-develop, co-market and sell “mixed-source” solutions to the Chinese public and private cloud market.
The widgetry will be built on Microsoft’s Hyper-V cloud architecture and include support for CS2C’s NeoKylin Linux Server products. A customer legal covenant agreement goes with it. What exactly that means wasn’t disclosed nor were any terms.
The pair also pledged to sponsor a joint virtual technology lab in Beijing for solution development and testing of cloud solutions, which is supposed to enable customers to move to virtualization and a cloud-based IT infrastructure. It will focus on the certification of NeoKylin on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, creating Microsoft Systems Center management packs for NeoKylin application workloads, and incorporating support for NeoKylin in Hyper-V.
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SolidFire Announces eScanner Efficiency Sizing Tool
SolidFire announced the public availability of its eScanner Efficiency Sizing tool. Previously only available to SolidFire Early-Access Program customers, eScanner is a stand-alone command line utility capable of scanning a series of datasets and determining the capacity they can save by running those datasets on a SolidFire all-SSD storage system.
The SolidFire eScanner removes the guesswork and time it takes to evaluate a dataset for duplicate data, compressibility, and thin provisioned space savings. The tool calculates the efficiencies gained within a SolidFire storage system by viewing volumes in a read only fashion and can scan block devices, file shares and trees, file lists, or VMFS datastores. All three of these technologies operate in real-time across the entire system and are capable of reducing capacity requirements by up to 70 percent.
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Construction Company Makes Zetta Data Protect Its Home in the Clouds
Robert Bogucki, IT manager at Skender Construction, researched multiple solutions when he started the disaster recovery project at Skender. Then he found Zetta. Zetta has a much more reasonable cost model with no charge for the ZettaMirror agent software, no matter how many copies are installed. Skender Construction's almost four terabytes of data are now backed up in the cloud with Zetta Data ProtectTM.
"Cost was an important factor, and paying $1.40 to $1.60 per gigabyte just didn't make sense after finding Zetta," said Bogucki. He installed the lightweight ZettaMirrorTM agent on two local backup servers, as well as the file server, to create and maintain nightly offsite copies of the locally backed-up data. "Zetta was up and replicating in a matter of minutes," said Bogucki. "It was very simple to implement and use."
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Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies
Cloud computing is a new approach in the provisioning and consumption of information technology (IT). While technology is a crucial component, the real value of cloud computing lies in its ability to enable new capabilities or in the execution of current capabilities in more efficient and effective ways.
Although the current hype around cloud computing has focused on expected cost savings, the true value is really found in the mission and business enhancements these techniques can provide. When properly deployed, the cloud computing model provides greatly enhanced mission and business capability without a commensurate increase in resource (time, people or money) expenditures.
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Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies
(This is part 2 of the series entitled "Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies" that first appeared on Forbes.com. This series provides the content of a whitepaper I recently authored. A copy of the complete whitepaper will be available at NJVC.com starting September 7, 2011.)
Despite the myriad benefits of cloud computing solutions, several challenges still exist. Being a young industry, there are few tools, procedures or standard data formats or service interfaces in place to guarantee data, computer application and service portability. As evidenced with the recent situation involving the services failure of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, outages can be a potential risk—and can have widespread implications for consumers of cloud services. This risk becomes even more severe if a mission-critical environment could be impacted.
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iomart Hosting's Cloud Computing Platform Helps Nova International
iomart Hosting has taken Nova International, organiser of a half marathon the Great North Run, into the cloud. Nova migrated its Great North Run website to the cloud with iomart Hosting earlier this year and will be performance testing the solution over the next few weeks.
More than half a million people will visit the site over this coming weekend for the Bupa Great North Run, as well as registering for Nova's other Great Run events in Edinburgh, Sheffield and Portsmouth which take place in October.
Chris Kewin, IT Director at Nova International, said: "iomart Hosting's technical expertise and support provides relief to Nova's small but busy IT team. It's critical for our business that we have a 24/7 scalable service.
Nova is looking seriously at cloud technology on which to build third generation systems that can scale out rather than up. Cloud technology provides the potential to bring in additional processing power during peak business periods rather than owning, managing and paying for that processing power all year round. When peak periods slow, properly designed clouds allow processing power to be scaled down again, ensuring business demand drives the technology requirements."
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SoftLayer Expands Network Capacity and Routing Footprint
SoftLayer Technologies on Tuesday announced that the company has completed upgrading the edge network routers across its wide area network (WAN). SoftLayer’s networking team installed Juniper Networks MX 3D Universal Edge Routers to all facilities and network points-of-presence. The newly implemented routers increase the company’s routing footprint by 400 percent adding four times the port capacity.
“Providing the best network performance and reliability is essential to our goal of giving customers the highest level of control over their infrastructure,” said Will Charnock, Vice President of Network Engineering for SoftLayer. “SoftLayer’s existing backbone routers were beginning to approach capacity. But rather than simply meeting those challenges, these upgrades boost performance, decrease latency, and give us capacity that will meet the demands of our growing customer base well into the future.”
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