The private cloud world hasn’t been the same since OpenStack sucked the air out of the room. Here’s a look at the companies doing private cloud before OpenStack and how they’ve fared. Read more »
Oracle’s acquisition of Nimbula gives it some needed private-cloud savvy and a toehold in the OpenStack camp — should it choose to keep Nimbula’s product around. Read more »
Rackspace says its new dashboard, part of its latest OpenStack-based private cloud release, will speed up cloud rollouts and configuration tasks by adding point-and-click capabilities for enteprise users. Read more »
Former Yahoo cloud VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray are trying to big data for programmers with a new platform service called Continuuity. It’s a development environment and runtime layer that sits atop a company’s Hadoop infrastructure and abstracts the complexity of writing apps. Read more »
Twitter has been awash (again) with banter about the myth or reality of private clouds. The conversations revolve around the technology, rehashing the “what makes a cloud a cloud” argument. Yet, all of us are right, and many of us are wrong. Read more »
When it comes to the debate on public versus private clouds or commodity versus legacy IT, there seems no room for nuance. So, while cloud and commodity IT are the way of the future, private cloud and legacy IT are here to stay. Read more »
Two weeks after launching its public OpenStack cloud, Rackspace follows suit with its private cloud implementation. The availability of both options will make it easier for customers interested in running hybrid cloud for their workloads, the company said. Read more »
Nimbula and MapR say that combining the former company’s scalable private cloud infrastructure with the latter’s Hadoop distribution will enable companies to run and manage big data applications much more easily. The idea is that a cloud infrastructure will make Hadoop much more flexible and available. Read more »
VMware has acquired DynamicOps, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud computing startup that spun out of banking giant Credit Suisse’s IT department in 2008. VMware is touting DynamicOps ability to manage resources running on Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2. Read more »
Eucalyptus, the company that wants to link private clouds to the Amazon cloud, is updating its platform software bringing it more in line with the open source model. All Eucalyptus 3.1 code will be available on Github. Subscribers will get plug-ins and other perks. Read more »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Brad Spiers, who runs cloud IT for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has some thoughts about the uses of cloud computing by financial services firms and what is holding back adoption of hot technologies like solid state storage and in-memory databases. Read more »
Cloud computing is at the top of virtually every CIO’s interest list and is expected to grow 126.5 percent over the next two years. A new report on GigaOM Pro details each sector of cloud computing and forecasts a shift toward hybrid models in the enterprise community. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are changing the game for IT departments. Section one of our three-part report describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. Read more »
If you didn’t think that Amazon was the king of cloud, just look at what other cloud companies announced Monday. Even paragons of the private cloud world are trying to cloak themselves in the glow cast by Amazon, which is squarely in public cloud realm. Read more »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This week UK Ministry of Justice official Martin Bellamy addressed concerns that the UK government has become less enthusiastic about a government cloud, saying, ”We are expecting to be able to demonstrate that moving to a cloud model is going to allow us to save substantial amounts ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
At the end of last month Verizon acquired CloudSwitch, adding value to Verizon’s January acquisition of cloud data center provider Terremark. Around the world, big telecommunications providers such as AT&T, BT, Telstra and Verizon have been hard at work, diversifying and seeking new business opportunities as ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Despite OpenStack’s continued growth, a combination of product updates and acquisitions from Citrix, Eucalyptus, Red Hat and VMware over the past week demonstrate that the race to become the dominant private cloud provider, as well as win over the enterprise, is far from over. Is one of ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Joyent has open-sourced its cloud operating system. Called SmartOS and already utilized in Joyent’s public cloud and SmartDataCenter private-cloud software, it will be available via an open-source license much like the Joyent-led Node.js effort is, says Joyent CTO Jason Hoffmann. Read more »
The next big leap in both technology and business models around sharing elastic compute resources will be bidding for those resources at auction or acquiring them through a broker, according to Forrester. But this broker business just adds more abstraction to an already abstract business. Read more »
In addition to enhancing privacy, dedicated circuits will generally result in more predictable data transfer performance and will also increase bandwidth between your data center and AWS. Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, sees plenty in the company’s new Direct Connect product that will interest […] Read more »
There’s little doubt that VMware will continue to maintain its lead as a virtualization supplier in the short run, but doing so over the long run is tricky business. So says Art Wittmann at InformationWeek about VMware’s vSphere 5 offering, updated this week. Despite the bolstering […] Read more »
Cloud services have a rosy future, but a long build-out industry cycle is expected as businesses are slow to adopt and accept virtual datacenters. Instead of determining to use a public or a private cloud, enterprises should consider a hybrid, best-of-both-worlds approach. Read more »
The current public cloud computing providers have done an excellent job in bringing innovation and cloud computing technology to the masses. Cloud computing, however, is not yet a fully evolved technology and may take another decade to grow up and deliver on its full potential. Read more »
The flagship private-cloud software from Nimbula, a startup created by two of the driving forces behind Amazon EC2, is now available for purchase by the public. Nimbula Director promises to give users an Amazon EC2-like IaaS experience within their own data centers or in hybrid environments. Read more »
DynamicOps has raised $11 million in Series B funding from Sierra Ventures, Next World Capital and investment bank Credit Suisse’s Next II venture group. Given its already-solid foundation, the new capital could go a long way toward making DynamicOps a household name in the private-cloud space. Read more »
Most companies that want the advantages of running an internal cloud aren’t prepared to make the shift, according to a report issued by Forrester Research. Analyst James Staten notes the lure of the cloud is strong, but most companies don’t have applications ready for cloud deployments. Read more »
Internal clouds are real and they’re here, but many efforts are still in their early days. The problem is that transitioning to a cloud-enabled environment can involve large degrees of technical, cultural and budgetary evolution, and it is of utmost importance that organizations deploy the right solution.
With this in mind, customers need to consider many things, and we profiled numerous solutions and companies to create a guide for deploying the right cloud solution to the right enterprise. We examined cloud application platforms, hypervisor-based clouds, internal infrastructure-as-a-service clouds, and high-performance computing clouds, in addition to looking at hybrid cloud solutions and underlying server architecture. Companies profiled include Appistry, Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware and CA Technologies, among others. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Every 15 years or so, the IT world undergoes a tectonic shift. Technological forces collide and grind against one another, creating an upheaval that leaves the landscape irrevocably changed. The latest such shift is currently underway: the transition to computing as a service, also known as ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
