Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Justin Kitagawa, lead front-end developer for GoGrid noted, ''When we started the GoGrid project, we wanted to push the boundaries of both front end and backend technologies. We were heavily influenced by Google Maps, the new Yahoo! Mail client, and several other state of the art AJAX applications. We wanted to have a thick client feel in the browser but with the performance of a thin client. Thick clients tend to require a much larger download and overhead, yet provide a richer experience, while conversely thin clients are much faster but less engaging visually.'' GoGrid is being showcased on the GWT Featured Project Page. GoGrid's rich, interactive graphical user interface (GUI) is built using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), an open-source Java development framework which enables GoGrid to provide a quick, responsive and interactive user experience. GoGrid is nominated for Best Virtualization Solution for the LinuxWorld 2008's Product Excellence Awards. The Goog...

The Global Shift is happening. SaaS, Cloud Computing and novo infrastructures and requirements are going to come from emerging markets. We all knew it and the more I see it happening, and the more I have spoken to my C-level friends and have been saying it all the time: " invest in Asia, if you want to survive the next revolution ", I am convinced that some of them might be just a bit too late now. But I did warn them in time. Do you want to know where you must already be looking at now? Africa and S. America! I have been spending a lot of time lately in several countries such as Ghana , Uganda etc and see a slow revolution starting up. I will be traveling to Uganda again in October/November. Anyways, here's the research that Forrester did: SaaS is a priority for 74% of Chinese firms, the research found, with 29% planning to pilot SaaS projects in the next 12 months. In Europe, the majority of organisations are interested but have no plans to pursue SaaS, while in the ...

Nice review. loud Computing has become a hot topic as of late with Amazon’s suite of web services frequently referenced in the press, and with focuses in academia and business as well. Cloud computing has become such a popular topic as of late that Hyperic has released a new service to trend the availability of Amazons various cloud computing services: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB (SDB), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Flexible Payment Service (FPS). Any developer can sign up with Amazon’s web services, create an application and deploy it on Amazon’s cloud of massive computing resources. When deploying applications for services that are intended to be available most of the time to their users (which most internet based applications do) the issue of performance always tends to arise. CloudStatus steps in by independently trending performance metrics of Amazon’s various cloud services with a well-designed interface that only consists of their web site at...

Microsoft is pursuing a different type of operating system, which goes by the name of Midori - and it's not the next version of Windows. Midori has received a great deal of attention in recent days but Microsoft has refused to say anything about Midori beyond confirming it's an "incubation project" within the company. Midori is related to Singularity, a research project that dates back to 2003 and looks at how to architect an operating system from the ground up, considering the past of computing and where things are headed in terms of parallelism and cloud computing. Whereas Singularity was a research effort firmly confined to a small team of researchers inside Microsoft's in-house labs, Midori is an effort to see if there is something commercially viable that could come out of it. Silicon.com

During the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, cloud computing was a popular topic among companies and attendees. GoGrid, who has a booth at LinuxWorld, is at the show to discuss its services and why users should select its services over Amazon and others. GoGrid admits Amazon is its biggest competitor, but says the main difference is that it's the first one available that has a Web-based GUI and supports both Microsoft Windows and Linux. Cloud computing, as it matures, offers both home users and corporations the ability to store data in the cloud while at the same time having multiple options when selecting a certain service to choose from. The companies promoting cloud computing admit there are some minor problems facing the technology, but look forward to helping more people adopt the technology. Source

Here are a few audio snippets from a Q and A session with the president of Google’s Enterprise division, Dave Girouard. The session took place on August 5th at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado. Girouard talks about Cloud Computing, Google’s new App Engine, the Google Apps productivity suite, competition versus partnerships, and how Google faces the challenges of protecting its users’ privacy and security. Source

Other investors include Bay Partners and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Amazon.com appears to have ramped up its investment pace in private companies this year. It purchased AbeBooks last week, took an equity stake in San Francisco Web service provider Engine Yard last month, sunk cash into The Talk Market in June andinvested in New York digital slideshow startup Animoto in May. Meanwhile, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has been busy pumping money into Internet companies such as Twitter, Pelago, Kongregate and others through his personal investment fund. Src

Hardware and services giant Hewlett-Packard, chip-maker Intel and web portal Yahoo! are to build “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment”. This will comprise six giant data centres, located around the world and based mainly on HP and Intel kit, each containing between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores. This platform will be used as a test bed for experimental ‘cloud computing’ services. Research partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research.

Don't believe me? Look here! More at Matt's site!

This is an interesting, in fact very interesting from a strategic and tactical weakness perspective. Here’s my problem with VMware in this situation. Ninety percent of the VMware sales organization is made up of former Dell employees. In fact there are so many ex-Dell sales people at VMware that they have had a self-imposed moratorium on hiring from Dell. As we know until recent years Dell was a very successful company. In fact they never had a layoff until 2001. For the first 16 years they were layoff free. Now those same sales people are at VMware and they have never experienced a downturn in sales or if they have they have not proven their ability to successfully fight their way out of it. I know several experienced sales people who are former Dell employees, but they in the minority. Dell was the least expensive and that goes a long way to selling units in the PC world. When HP and others figured out a way to produce boxes as cheaply that’s when Dell started to lose. When you are...

With the Hong Kong SAR Government seeking a reduction in energy intensity of at least 25 percent by 2030 1 , local business leaders are under increased pressure from stakeholders to employ green initiatives. At the same time, CEOs are planning to increase their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments by 25 percent over the next three years 2 as customers pay careful attention to their suppliers’ CSR profiles, including “green” initiatives. With the rising expectation that suppliers are socially responsible, and the increasing realization of the importance of energy efficiency, IBM’s comprehensive set of solutions are perfectly timed to meet market demand. “Project Big Green reflects our commitment to the environment and to delivering energy efficient solutions to help our clients tackle the escalating energy and rental costs challenge in their data centers,” said Dominic Tong, General Manager, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “With a blend of hardware, software, technology and...

Qumranet, the commercial sponsor of the KVM virtualization software, has begun beta-testing a desktop virtualization system aimed at geographically distributed organizations. The company's existing Solid ICE desktop virtualization system was designed to combat performance issues, which continue to be a down-side of desktop virtualization. Solid ICE Multi-Site takes Qumranet's efforts a step further, dealing with branch offices and remote sites. Under Solid ICE, the user's desktop runs in a KVM virtual machine in a data center, and the user accesses it via the SPICE remote rendering software on a thin client or repurposed PC. Unlike virtualization companies such as VMware, whose technology was generally designed with server virtualization in mind, the Solid ICE framework was designed to solve the performance problems inherent in virtualized desktops, Qumranet said. Source

SAN DIEGO – June 25, 2008 – Nirvanix, the premier “Cloud Storage” platform provider optimized for media and large files, today announced the beta of a groundbreaking new set of products that attaches the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network to a local network as a Windows or Linux filer using standard industry networking protocols. Users can then work with the applications they are accustomed to, or simply drag and drop files from their desktops to Nirvanix’s award-winning storage service. “Nirvanix CloudNAS represents a significant advancement in cloud storage,” said Patrick Harr, CEO of Nirvanix. “Previously, enterprises could only access cloud storage by programming to an API. Now with CloudNAS, customers can immediately integrate Nirvanix’s cloud storage into their existing applications and processes, and forego new purchases of expensive NetApp, EMC, IBM or other NAS products in favor of Nirvanix’s storage-as-a-service offering.” Since CloudNAS is built on the Storage Delivery Net...

CHICAGO and LIVINGSTON, Scotland – June 24, 2008 – CohesiveFT, providers of the Elastic Server Platform, an on-demand service for dynamic assembly and deployment of virtual machines, and FlexiScale, a leading provider of true on-demand Cloud computing, today announced a technology partnership to enable deployment of CohesiveFT’s Elastic Servers to FlexiScale's Cloud. The integration of technologies from CohesiveFT and FlexiScale will enable true on-demand application stack assembly and deployment on a pay-as-you-go Cloud. This combination allows genuinely scaleable, high availability production environments that do not require in-house operations expertise to build and maintain such a facility. Beyond substantial manpower savings the combined solution significantly reduces capital and energy expenditures. This partnership will also allow ISVs, application developers and QA teams to dramatically increase their productivity throughout the development lif...

Interesting article. Everyone agreed that cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com CRM have become bona fide enterprise options, but there were also questions about privacy, data security, industry standards, vendor lock-in, and high-performing apps that have yet to be vaporized as cloud services. (For a recap of that give and take, see " Customers Fire A Few Shots At Cloud Computing ") If we learned anything from our Enterprise 2.0 cloud forum, it's that IT departments need to know more. Our approach here is to look at cloud computing from the points of view of eight leading vendors. In doing so, we're leaving out dozens of companies that have a role to play, but what we lack in breadth, we hope to compensate for in depth. And this analysis is just the beginning of expanded editorial coverage by InformationWeek on cloud computing. Visit our just-launched Cloud Computing blog on InformationWeek.com, and sign up for our new weekl...

State-of-the-art digital media storage and global CDN technology reduce costs, improve performance and provide massive scalability for content-rich Internet companies San Jose, CA and San Diego, CA – June 23, 2008 – CDNetworks (KOSDAQ: 073710), a top-three global, full-service content delivery network (CDN) and Nirvanix, a premier global “Cloud Storage” platform provider optimized for media, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver the industry’s only unified cloud storage and content delivery service. Available immediately, CDNetworks’ customers will be able to store unlimited amounts of protected and secure content online and move content instantly to and from any of CDNetworks’ 63 nodes worldwide at previously unseen economies. The partnership with CDNetworks will provide Nirvanix customers with the ability to not only securely store massive amounts of media and content but also stage content for instant delivery anywhere in the world, utilizing one of CDNetworks’ data c...

CUPERTINO, Calif., June 23, 2008 – Parascale, a provider of cloud storage solutions for rich media content in traffic-intensive applications, today announced that it has closed a $11.37 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Parascale plans to use the funding for product development and marketing initiatives in preparation for the launch of Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS), an application that aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud, accessible via standard file access protocols. Parascale was founded on the premise that advances in computer hardware over the past 10 years make it possible for file storage, management, and distribution solutions to be more reliable, easier to manage, and less expensive to purchase and operate than ever before. Adopting the best technologies available, Parascale has developed a new class of storage solutions designed to suppor...

In 2001, IBM coined the phrase ‘autonomic computing’ to describe systems that can fix themselves. Virtualisation wunderkind VMWare brought that vision of self-healing IT a significant step closer to reality in May 2008 with its acquisition of Israeli application performance management vendor B-hive. B-hive’s Conductor tool monitors application performance and produces alerts when a bug or performance deterioration threatens service level agreements (SLAs) – even within virtual environments, where the relationship between software and hardware can be convoluted. More here...

Well I love the talk but Cloud Computing is leaving your confort zone of the Siloed Clouds (Server Virtualization, carve up stuff and host big fat apps on big fat OSs on a hypervisor) and going into a crowded Cloud market where apps float across the planet and have no business to do with OS or any hypervisor. I occasionally watch those cloud discussions and we are seeing discussions like the SOAs, WSDL kind of talk we heard a few years back. This means that the market and space is massively crowded. Many virtualization buffs took off from the early S-belly train and placed their bets in the clouds. The bigger giants like IBM, Microsoft, Google and also smaller but agile guys like Rackspace etc are buying data centers across the world or should I say, renting space across the planet. The problem with the cloud computing market is that its crowded! Anyways Bridget reporting here: “The dream of cloud computing is fast becoming reality,” she said. With cloud computing, workloads are assign...

SAN DIEGO – April 22, 2008 – Nirvanix, the premier “Cloud Storage” platform provider, today announced a 30-day “fee holiday” for all uploads from any source including Amazon S3 to a new account on its Storage Delivery Network (SDN), making the decision even easier for companies considering the integration of this acclaimed web-based storage service into their applications or storage environment. “We found that there are many companies that experimented with cloud storage when there were only one or two choices on the market. They have built up a substantial amount of data online and are looking for ‘best of breed’ now that enterprise-class solutions are available,” said Jonathan Buckley, Chief Marketing Officer with Nirvanix. “For a company with just 50 Terabytes of archived data, for instance, this holiday can mean a setup savings of well over $9,000 to move to the world’s fastest, most reliable cloud storage platform in the world.” Additionally, Nirvanix announced the availability o...