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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...