Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING. WITHIN 2 SECONDS YOU WILL BE REDIRECTED TO THE NEW HOME OF AVASTU BLOG. PLEASE DO UPDATE AVASTU BLOG'S URL to : http://www.ideationcloud.com on your website. I will send out emails personally to those who are using my link(s) on their sites. Thanks much for your co-operation and hope you enjoy the new site and its cool new features :-) Not like the site is unlive or something..on the contrary, its beginning to get a lot of attention already. Well most of the work is done, you don't have to worry about anything though: What won't change Links/Referrals: I will be redirecting the links (all links which you may have cross-posted) to IdeationCloud.com - so you don't have to do anything in all your posts and links . Although, I would urge however that you do change the permalinks, especially on your blogs etc yourself This blog is not going away anywhere but within a few months, I will consider discontinuing its usage. I won't obviou

My upcoming article, part - 3 data center predictions for 2009, has a slideshot talking about the transition from the current age to the cloud computing age to eventually the ideation age- the age where you will have clouds that will emote but they will have no internal employees. Biggest management disasters occur because internal folks are making a mess of the playground. Om's blog is carrying an article about Cloud security and it is rather direct but also makes a lot of sense: I don’t believe that clouds themselves will cause the security breaches and data theft they anticipate; in many ways, clouds will result in better security. Here’s why: Fewer humans – Most computer breaches are the result of human error ; only 20-40 percent stem from technical malfunctions. Cloud operators that want to be profitable take humans out of the loop whenever possible. Better tools – Clouds can afford high-end data protection and security monitoring tools, as well as the experts to run them

Virtuozzo's main differentiators versus hypervisors center on overhead, virtualization flexibility, administration and cost. Virtuozzo requires significantly less overhead than hypervisor solutions, generally in the range of 1% to 5% compared with 7% to 25% for most hypervisors, leaving more of the system available to run user workloads. Customers can also virtualize a wider range of applications using Virtuozzo, including transactional databases, which often suffer from performance problems when used with hypervisors. On the administration side, customers need to manage, maintain and secure just a single OS instance, while the hypervisor model requires customers to manage many OS instances. Of course, the hypervisor vendors have worked hard to automate much of this process, but it still requires more effort to manage and maintain multiple operating systems than a single instance. Finally, OS virtualization with Virtuozzo has a lower list price than the leading hypervisor for comme

Boston , December 16, 2008 – Seanodes, the creator and leading developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today announced that cloud services provider Aenigma has developed a new multi-tiered storage infrastructure backed by Exanodes™ software to increase the reliability and performance of its High Availability Application Hosting Platform for as little as one-twentieth the cost of a similarly configured Fibre Channel SAN. Delivering Software as a Service Aenigma provides an alternative to on-premise software deployment offering all the benefits and advantages of high availability and enterprise-grade business tools such as Microsoft Project Server, Office Sharepoint Server and Exchange Server on demand, at a competitive price. As a member of the VMware Service Provider Program Aenigma provides companies with on-demand Virtual Infrastructure, which can support any operating system, Windows or Linux and any compatible software stack they need. This “pay as you go” model r

Surveys will start being published on my site and I'll make more customized surveys with cool flash animations. For now, I'm content with the simpler version of LinkedIn surveys. Click here to join

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EWeek's labs picked up some neat collection of VMware's virtual appliances. Although I don't seem to read anywhere what the criteria might have been, it is important to note that these appliances are a security/application centric collection, I haven't been visiting the marketplace for some time so do go there and check out some stuff there. They have a huge collection out there. Here's EWeek's top 5

Search my older post and you'll find that I had already suggested VMware and other vendors to go for several versions of hypervisors. VMware has taken the stride towards mobile devices, which is definitely a good thing but that market is a flooded market. Desktop PCs are in need for some rationalization. I have, some times, hard time convincing customers why they should move towards VDI- while many are lately wondering if Cloud Apps, hosted via their internal, on-premise Cloud Infrastructure or Off Premise Clouds - a typical hosted scenario. Either ways they just don't care anymore, so is the case of the Clouds. Clouds don't care either. That makes it a perfect match, especially the new beast we all want to comprehend, the beast which only the likes of Microsoft has understood rather well, the SMB market. SMB's are typically the "I don't care, you fix it and fix it now" kind of folks. Taming that market segment is a real pain. They are sometimes hard to un

Ed has some good tips. Last time I spoke to Ed, I got to understand that he's on to a lot more things such as writing a book and some toolkit. Mike Hoesing has beaten him to it there since his book on Virtualization Security is already up there on Amazon. I am looking forward to Ed's book as well though. Anyways, like I said, last when I spoke to Ed was about pushing the virtualization security initiative here in the EMEA. I have spoken to several little and bigger players, including our own large team ("our" as in my employer ) of some 500+ security experts,who are doing lots RA's for firms across the globe. Anyways here's Haletky's article: The roles and permissions within the VI Client do not necessarily map to users and groups within the service console or management appliance. Roles and permissions are quite a bit different actually and do not always map one to one. When you directly connect the VI Client to a VMware ESX or VMware ESXi host you will

New features of VRM include: Extensions that support key virtual desktop components included in Citrix XenDesktop™ and VMware’s virtual desktop infrastructure. Microsoft’s Hyper-V support. The VRM Infrastructure Organizer, for fast, efficient mapping of an organization’s virtual assets into its existing shared infrastructure. VRM automates the management of virtual servers and desktops, from the time they’re created until they’re decommissioned. Innovations such as VRM’s desktop extensions help IT organizations deliver high value and competitive advantages to their customers. "Desktop virtualization is taking off, and large scale deployments see high rates of change. These deployments need management tools to be efficient and economical," said Rachel Chalmers, research director, infrastructure, the 451 Group. "DynamicOps' VRM can let desktop groups choose best-of-breed point products while retaining overall control of their environment." VRM desktop extensions

It's Saturdays and I'm sure Stephen won't be upset at me for that title :-) good luck at Tripwire, Stephen! "Stephen is the perfect fit for Tripwire as we continue to extend our leadership in the virtualization market, seeking new and different ways to address the growing customer needs in the market," said Dan Schoenbaum, COO of Products for Tripwire. "We are excited to have Stephen on board to help us further expand and execute on our corporate strategy to address our clients' growing virtualization needs." Stephen is co-author of two books on virtualization, "Essential VMware ESX Server" and "Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration." In addition, he is Technical Editor of "VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide" and a contributing author to "How to cheat at configuring VMware ESX Server." A respected expert on virtualization technology, Stephen is a frequen

As a first step in the companies' expanded relationship, VMware would work with HP to integrate HP BTO software with VMware vCenter Lab Manager, which provides self-service access to a library of pre-configured virtualized application environments, allowing teams of users to check out systems on-demand while IT maintains administrative control. With Lab Manager, organizations can reduce hardware costs, automate manual provisioning tasks, and accelerate application development and test cycles. In addition, VMware and HP would jointly develop and bring to market enhanced virtualization management offerings for VMware vCenter and HP BTO customers based on the HP BTO application and infrastructure discovery technologies (HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping) to better manage their VDC-OS environments. A VDC-OS enables businesses to efficiently pool all types of hardware resources (including servers, storage and network) into an "internal enterprise cloud" that acts like a sin

STORServer introduced an upgrade to its STORServer Agent for VMware Consolidated Backup, designed to increase usability and performance. Highlights of these upgrades include a new license server and online help system. Introduced in September 2007, the STORServer Agent for VMware Consolidated Backup integrates IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager and VMware Consolidated Backup. To address the challenges of protecting VMware environments, the Agent improves the usability of Consolidated Backup by providing centralized management, reporting and scheduling of virtual machine backups and eliminates cumbersome pre- and post-processing integration scripts. The Agent includes an easy to use graphical user interface for the management and reporting of virtual machine backups; a scheduler; and a database containing client configurations, logs and scheduling information. Source

“VMware is pleased to see Symantec deliver solutions like VCS for high availability that integrate with and complement the value of VMware virtualization for customers and reinforce the importance of a strong partner ecosystem that helps differentiate VMware virtualization,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances at VMware. “We look forward to continued collaboration with Symantec to enable support for VCS for VMware users and improve the experience for joint customers through initiatives such as the TSANet-based cooperative support agreement announced today.” The collaborative support initiative between Symantec and VMware through TSANet delivers highly trained support expertise to solve customers’ high availability needs. Already a global member of TSANet, Symantec has now joined a cooperative support community for virtualization established by VMware earlier this year to promote collaboration to deliver mission-critical support for joint enterprise customers.

NetWrix has some cool things going with their Change reporter for both VMware and Microsoft's SCVMM. VMware was launched recently. Change auditing is an important process for controlling the management of your virtual environment, to limit unauthorized changes and errors in VI3 inventory. Erroneous and unauthorized changes usually occur every day in organizations in which many IT professionals manage different aspects of virtual infrastructure. Such changes can cause failures and outages in your virtual infrastructure and significantly contribute to virtual machine sprawl. NetWrix Change Reporter for VMware Infrastructure 3 audits all changes and enforces controlled change management processes across your virtual environment. This freeware tool sends a daily report pointing to every change made to your ESX servers, folders, clusters, resource pools, virtual machines, and their hardware (*), including previous and current ("before" and "after") configuration valu

HP today announced the expansion of its virtualized browsing solution across select business desktop products and its plans to introduce Linux as an operating system choice for business desktop customers. The offerings are designed to help small businesses enhance their productivity and ease their management of technology. The first-of-its-kind Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solution was developed with Symantec and Mozilla for HP customers. The solution uses the standard release of Mozilla Firefox with a Symantec Software Virtualization Solution layer that allows customers to use the Internet productively while keeping business PCs stable and easier to support. As customers surf the web, changes made to the PC are contained in a “virtual layer,” separate from the operating system, and do not permanently alter the machine. Customers can therefore reset the browser as needed, instantly returning the PC to its last-known good state. Previously offered on the HP Compaq dc7900 Bus

Today, the FSF let Cisco Systems know in no uncertain terms that line had been crossed . The complaint centers on the Linksys brand routers, and the firmware used on those products. Brett Smith, the licensing compliance engineer at the FSF said that in 2003, the FSF was notified that the Linksys WRT54G used GPL/LGPL licensed code in its firmware, but customers weren't getting the source code that these licenses required Cisco supply . He said that initially, Cisco seemed willing to work with the FSF to put procedures in place so that its products -- at the time, and in the future -- would comply with the license terms the firmware used. Over the course of five years, a compliance plan never materialized. As the FSF investigated the Linksys WRT54G complaint, it was receiving license violation reports regarding other Cisco products. Smith says that new issues were being brought up before the older ones could be addressed, resulting in "...a five-years-running game of Whack-A-

I am assuming that it was not just the experimental excel sheet that John put up on his blog that prompted Amazon to get him over to their shop. Amazon, with its clear strategy to go to the EU are sure to be racing ahead. Motto: The time to hire smart and hard-working folks is...NOW! The word on the street is that James Hamilton - one of the chief nerds that has helped Microsoft plan its containerized data center strategy for its forthcoming Azure compute cloud - is leaving to take a job at Amazon. And perhaps not coincidentally, this is happening at the same time as the local papers in Oregon are reporting that Amazon is looking to build a new data center near the cheap electricity generated by hydroelectric dams along the fast-moving Columbia River. Hamilton, who has one of the smarter blogs dealing with data center issues, has spent a decade at Microsoft Research and a decade at IBM before that. Back in 2006, Hamilton was one of the earlier proponents for modularized data centers, t

Nortel Networks Corp.'s contemplation of a bankruptcy filing comes after years of strategic missteps, accounting scandals and failed restructurings that have reduced the company, once one of Canada's flagships, to a shadow of its former self. Nortel once boasted a stratospheric market value of $250 billion, when speculators overestimated demand for fiber-optic networks to carry Internet and video traffic around the world. That bubble burst in 2000, and Nortel has spent the better part of a decade trying, unsuccessfully, to get back on its feet. WSJ I really, really hate my typos :-|

In a move that will extend the Web's biggest cloud to encompass much of the globe, the company that began as an online bookstore is opening its commercial server hosting platform to the EU. The basic Amazon EC2 cloud services platform is now open to customers in the European Union. While this will bring Amazon's managed hosting alternative closer to potentially thousands more customers, they'll be paying slightly higher fees than in the US. Instance charges -- the flat rates for each guest operating system hosted within the EC2 cloud -- will be 10% higher for EC customers than for those in the US. Prices will range from 0.11 cents (in US currency) per hour for the smallest virtual CPU to 0.88 cents per hour for the highest capacity virtual CPU, compared to 0.10 cents and 0.80 cents, respectively, in the US. Data transfer rates, however, will be identical, with input rates at 0.10 cents per GB, and declining output rates starting at 0.17 cents per GB for the first 10 TB, dow

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Michael is running this story about an ex-CEO of Netvibes, who plans to provide a much robust and feature richer netbook, quick-boot OS with all you may need to get on the Cloud. Avastu advisory for investors Wait till 2010, there are a lot more little start-ups, many names I can't reveal as they are still in stealth mode. Many of such start-ups will also fail as they only end up picking up one end of the spectrum and running with it. A typical downmarket/upmarket tussle, where you will, have to not only rely on better and more complete products but also ones that have following characteristics: Heterogeneity Interoperability Embedded functionality Un-brickability (From hardware perspective) Unbreakability (Not tampered with) Security So continuously listening to: Real-Time Analysts Bloggers Web Will be your best bet in this world. Here's Mike's story: There are a ton of other features as well, including a planned application platform for third party developers, but the com

Despite a downturn in the global economy, many organizations are paying a lot of attention to GRC (governance, security and compliance). Virtualization is penetrating in the markets and it is not a trend that is about to stop. The reason why virtualization is penetrating is due to the flexibility it offers organizations, but this flexibility comes at a cost, like any other freedom: vulnerability or exposure to risks. Without a solid control of your people, processes and technology, in this fast and dynamic changing world, your business could be dissolved in no time. Cloud Computing, where virtualization will be a key building block, for Data Centers worldwide, will only increase that "data in transit" challenge where it will cross borders and boundaries. When we lifted the curtain, we forgot that we suddenly were talking to whole world: naked! So the intention of this survey is to gauge your experiences, challenges and understanding of the security dilemma, that could cost u

According to IBM, the software will be programmed to "...discover and isolate organic molecules that when combined can convert more sunlight into electricity and thus produce solar cells much more inexpensively." Stanley Litgow, IBM's vice president of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, and the president of the IBM International Foundation, said "IBM believes that this important new study powered by World Community Grid could provide the planet with a smarter solution to the problem of low cost solar technology. This project marks an expanded direction to help our society by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels to make a lasting impact by hopefully finding new sources of clean energy." The team's effort will be capable of computing "in 2 years what would've taken 22 years to run on a regular scientific cluster," according to Alan Aspuru-Guzik of Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. The software wil

Check it out here Saw first at Alessandro's site

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – December 8, 2008 – RightScale, Inc ., the leader in cloud computing management, today announced that it has secured $13 million in its second round of venture capital funding, led by Index Ventures. Current investor Benchmark Capital, which led RightScale's first round of venture financing, also participated in this round. In addition, RightScale announced that Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer has joined the company's board of directors. RightScale will use the proceeds to accelerate product and market development of its cloud computing management platform to meet growing demand, including support for new clouds and expansion into additional geographic markets. Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, commented, "Index Ventures has a superb track record in identifying winning technology companies in high growth markets, and we are very pleased that they have demonstrated their confidence in RightScale by leading this financing round. The market fo

I've had several reasons to start looking at other options. Finding to play around with Wordpress on my site Avastu.com, which is hosted on Anyways, please check out my site here and do let me know if you like it there. I will blog here and will keep synchronizing stuff to the IdeationCloud , and finally after having chosen the right design/style, I'll make my final move to IdeationCloud All the redirection will happen automagically, I will be trying several tips that are hanging there on the cloud, one of them is this one , pretty handy, I must say.

I've created some here. Budget considerations for 2009 & Desktop Virtualization Thanks for your time :-)

All that is changing now. So-called "cloud computing" -- using software online, writing and storing documents at a Web site accessible anywhere, moving seamlessly from office to home to hotel to airport lounge, from workstation to laptop to smartphone -- has ended my bondage to a single C: drive. In a parallel development, I have discovered that prayer can happen anywhere. Prayer doesn't require pew or book. In fact, the God who is found elsewhere often seems more vivid and complex than the managed presentation of denomination or parish. Faith, it seems, is profoundly portable. We are descended from wanderers, after all, who found God "on the way," not in a place. Lest you deem this a pallid so-what discovery, think about how much energy we devote to sustaining buildings and places. Think about our devotion to denomination and tradition and the way we compartmentalize, as if work and faith were unrelated enterprises. Think about the caustic divisions by which re

IDC says its study, Virtualizing the Desktop Part 2: Client-Hosted Virtualization Leadership Grid, "compares the solutions of the top vendors providing desktop virtualization solutions, executed directly on the client. Solutions are ranked in an IDC Leadership Grid, and extensive information is provided on solution capabilities and vendor market positioning." Terrific, but just four vendors products are evaluated and they are VMware, RingCube, MokaFive, and Sentillion. Don't bother looking for Xen Desktop in the study. It isn't there. Nor is the IBM virtual desktop. Just in case you think that VMware is it and you can forget the other three vendors in the study, IDC says: "from a technological perspective RingCube offered some of the best features currently available, while VMware held the strongest marketing position and ecosystem. MokaFive delivered a strong product with excellent management features and Sentillion provided a solution with a high degree of secu

Microsoft's getting squeezed at the high end of the PC market by elegant Apple computers running OSX and at the lower end by less expensive desktops and netbooks running Linux. The web metrics firm also said Internet Explorer's market share fell below 70 per cent for the first time in more than ten years, to 69.8 per cent. IE lost 1.5 points in November alone, dropping a total of 5.8 per cent market share so far in 2008, with one month still left to go. Competing web browsers Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari gained 0.8 per cent and 0.6 per cent market shares respectively during November alone, according to Net Applications. If those trends continue, Internet Explorer will fall beneath 60 per cent market share in 2009. Source

Those zones or pods will be built in a fashion similar to the modular datacenters sold in large shipping containers equipped with their own cooling systems. But datacenter pods don't have to be built within actual containers. The distinguishing features are that zones are built with different densities, reducing initial costs, and each pod or zone is self-contained with its own power feeds and cooling, Claunch says. Cooling costs are minimized because chillers are closer to heat sources; and there is additional flexibility because a pod can be upgraded or repaired without necessitating downtime in other zones, Claunch said. (Read more about how to reduce cooling costs in the datacenter.) "Modularization is a good thing. It gives you the ability to refresh continuously and have higher uptime," Claunch said. By not treating a datacenter as a homogenous whole, it is easier to separate equipment into high, medium, and low heat densities, and devote expensive cooling only to t

3. Data Regulations: Each jurisdiction around the world has slightly different approaches to the regulation of data privacy and the Australian Law Reform Commission has recently released a report suggesting significant strengthening of Australia's data privacy regime. Therefore it is important that customers understand where their data will ultimately be stored and by whom so that they can ensure compliance with Australian privacy and also record retention regulations. Many SaaS providers work on the basis of centralised infrastructure that is not based in Australia. The customer must ensure that contractually the provider is bound to comply with Australian privacy laws before allowing the data to be exported. The issue is further compounded if the SaaS provider then uses a third party to do the storage of the data. Such is the complexity that EMC announced recently that it is having difficulty choosing a location to build the data centres to run its storage-as-a-service offering

What will be the next hot IT trend in 2009 for state and local government? Government Technology informally polled prominent CIOs and security experts about their best guesses. Predictably no consensus emerged, but the majority opinion was that government will turn to technologies that are easy on budgets -- much like U.S. consumers are cutting back their spending amid Wall Street struggles and turmoil in the credit and housing markets. States were forced to close a $48 billion gap in their fiscal 2009 budgets, and the economic pain also has stretched into municipal government because of tax revenue shortfalls. "Whatever gets measured will get funded," South Dakota CIO Otto Doll said. "Under fiscal duress, governors will seek accountability through statistics to ensure cost effectiveness." While that posture could signal that unproven, big-budget IT projects will be delayed until the economy recovers, others believe downsized spending will necessitate innovation. On

With its virtualized Linux environments, Scania is achieving shortened time-to-services and increased flexibility. Scania can now perform system maintenance by shutting down servers in a structured process, enabling preserved stability and reliability. Throughout the rest of its virtualized Linux infrastructure, Scania also has the option of leveraging the solution's included Live Migration functionality, allowing for the transfer of virtual systems between physical machines in the network to reduce the hardware requirements necessary to maintain the same workload. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform replaces some proprietary Unix dialects in Scania's infrastructure with an open platform without lock-in to a specific vendor. We are now building a cost-efficient, flexible and stable infrastructure on top of the Red Hat platform, and have maintained high security and stability throughout the process," said Mikael Ahlqvist, service team responsible for Unix at S

Eventually it all comes down to cash and selling power. VMware has been having trouble selling purely because it just doesn't have the kind of DNA and animals in their shops who are as capable of selling the products for recessionary times. Of course, you can sell when the times are good. You can also sell when people are in dire need to replace hardware and want to cut costs, but how can you sell if those IT managers and CxOs start asking you questions such as: o Why should I invest in this new technology? o Why should I not just consolidate my systems traditionally, bung all web servers on one big fat server and create application pools, bung all the DBs into one and create multiple instances? o Why must I train my staff when I barely have cash to train them on apps? You know how it goes, these questions have never stopped coming, and in harder times it gets harder, we all know it. All these messages are being sent out to all employees across the globe. But... You can still sell.

DoD guys and all the other folks who are building expertise around the security which they have gained while building a secured VMware environment by design, are also being exposed to the ones that can play potential havoc in your environments, should you not take security into account when designing and operating your virtual environments. Ask yourself the following: Do you know that such malicious attacks are not taking place in your environment? Do you know if there is some sort of control in your environments? How many of you have successfully deployed a CCP that makes your ESX complaint or atleast anywhere close to being SOX/PCI DSS 1.x standards? You must be able to control, authorize and demonstrate on your sense of control on these environments, can you do it? Are you doing any sort of assessments in your environments, especially Virtual Infrastructures be it Oracle VM, VMware ESX, Citrix Xen, Xen or whatever? Are some or any of your virtual platforms registered within your cen

We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all. We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing. Source

I have covered MyBooo, iCloud and se veral other Cloud like OS, this gOS version too goes after the same model. But maybe we will eventually see the emergence of netbooks, where HP is doing a lot of work and shipping touch-screen like netbooks, with Cloud OS, fast-boot embedded Linux OS with a Browser like OS that will soon kill all those fat transitional versions we all call VDI etc. Regular PCs are definitely going to die and VDI's will be killed as Cloud OSs ill steal the thunder right under the noses of all the VDI vendors. When Google released the beta for its Chrome web browser in September, it it led to discussions about the idea that in the future, web applications could completely take the place of traditional applications. Computers would no longer need OSs as we now know them; they would only need to run a browser. A recent product announcement brought us a little closer to that future. In a press release Monday, Good OS announced a new OS called Cloud. According to the

I quickly uploaded a Excel file to my Zoho account and created a database. The upload of those 500 records went pretty fast. Generation of reports seems to work well and fast. Features are pretty cool: Embedding to site, viewing underlying data, Embedded stuff: (As chart here, you can also do it as image) Viewing underlying data: And here a pie chart on top 10 vendors who got contracts in Nov 2008 Month! And an exported format as a *.png file Data: ButlerGroup Tool: Zoho CloudDB My verdict: I like it! :-)

Although, I am still pretty skeptical of the whole SQL talk in the Cloud (being an SQL DBA veteran myself), I do also welcome this development in the Cloud. The Zoho blog says the following: There are in particular 3 things that stand out about Zoho CloudSQL : It's the first technology that allows customers to interact with their data on the cloud, from another cloud application or from an on-premises one through real SQL. It supports multiple SQL dialects . We support all the major (and even some not so major) ones: ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix. With our JDBC/ODBC drivers , developers can access data in the cloud just as easily as if it were stored in a local database. The next natural question is: What Zoho services you can access through Zoho CloudSQL? Today we're starting with Zoho Reports , our on-line reporting and business intelligence service, and soon other relevant Zoho services will follow-suit. Zoho Reports ( which used to be ca

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision">Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision</a> Today we are sharing our Generation 4 Modular Data Center plan. This is our vision and will be the foundation of our cloud data center infrastructure in the next five years. We believe it is one of the most revolutionary changes to happen to data centers in the last 30 years. Joining me, in writing this blog are Daniel Costello, my director of Data Center Research and Engineering and Christian Belady, principal power and cooling architect. I feel their voices will add significant value to driving understanding around the many benefits included in this new design paradigm. Our “Gen 4” modular dat

Yes, Microhoo buzz is back, even if it never really went away. This time it was London's The Sunday Times stirring the pot, reporting that Microsoft will be making a $20 billion play for Yahoo!'s search business. BoomTown's Kara Swisher quickly shot holes into the story, and she has the Rolodex to confirm or debunk nearly all of the Microhoo chatter. The deal didn't make sense. The alleged new management team didn't make sense. The price -- significantly more than all of Yahoo! is worth -- certainly didn't add up. However, convincingly putting out one fire doesn't mean that another one isn't about to be rekindled somewhere else. Microhoo chatter will never die, because, quite frankly, it makes too much sense. Fool

I don't know what Om is raving about, but Shankland too wrote a brave post about how he shifted to Chrome. I particularly like Firefox for all it does for me. I do fat things, I have heavy needs and I am not in need of something fast when I am pretty much content with the quality of content delivered to me. So for all the cool extensions like ABP, IE plugin, Facebook, LinkedIn etc etc, I am not about to pick Chrome. Nice article but it really doesn't make any solid case for Google's Cloud readiness. They're good in search and have a lot of data indexed. That it. A lot has changed in the past 10 years. For one thing, the cost of hardware and network infrastructure has declined sharply. Such a decline has led to what's known as cloud computing, whereby companies like Amazon.com ( AMZN ) offer infrastructure on demand. That has, in turn, allowed innovators to roll out their applications without making major outlays up front. In the meantime, always-on broadband conne

I guess, that is what I can see what Jim is getting at. Cloud or On-Premise IT shop. Boring is boring. A lot has to change before we can call Clouds the true platforms of change! While I agree that the enterprise is about control and the web is about emergence ( I've made the same argument here at Radar ), I don't think this negative characterization of the enterprise is all that useful. It seems to imply that the enterprise's orientation toward control springs fully formed from the minds of an army of petty controlling middle managers. I don't think that's the case. I suspect it's more likely the result of large scale system dynamics, where the culture of control follows from other constraints. If multiverse advocates are right and there are infinite parallel universes, I bet most of them have IT enterprises just like ours; at least in those shards that have similar corporate IT boundary conditions. Once you have GAAP, Sarbox, domain-specific regulation lik

This one is a neat article, although you would like to work on the figures yourself. What can we learn from this model? First, we see that power costs not only don’t dominate, but are behind the cost of servers and the aggregated infrastructure costs. Server hardware costs are actually the largest. However, if we look more deeply, we see that the infrastructure is almost completely functionally dependent on power. From Belady and Manos’ article Intense Computing or In Tents Computing , we know that 82% of the overall infrastructure cost is power distribution and cooling. The power distribution costs are functionally related to power, in that you can’t consume power if you can’t get it to the servers. Similarly, the cooling costs are clearly 100% related to the power dissipated in the data center, so cooling costs are also functionally related to power as well. We define the fully burdened cost of power to be sum of the cost of the power consumed and the cost of both the co

To use Amazon SimpleDB you: * CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data. * GET, PUT or DELETE items in your domain, along with the attribute-value pairs that you associate with each item. Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data as it is added to your domain so that it can be quickly retrieved; there is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. Each item can have up to 256 attribute values. Each attribute value can range from 1 to 1,024 bytes. * QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators: =, !=, <, > <=, >=, STARTS-WITH, AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION. QUERYWITHATTRIBUTES enables developers to retrieve the information associated with items returned as a response to a particular query. Your QUERY or QUERYWITHATTRIBUTES results can be sorted using the SORT operator. Query execution time is currently limited to 5 seconds. Amazon SimpleDB is designed for real-time applications and is optimi