Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

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...

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...

Silicon Valley has a new parlour game: what's going to happen to Sun after the cuts? Rumours suggest it will merge with EMC, that HP or IBM will take it over, that Fujitsu will buy its hardware business, or even that the StorageTek storage business unit will be spun off. Do Sun's leaders want to be redeemed or to retire? The company has bit the downsizing bullet and announced up to 6000 job losses following on from a $1.7bn quarterly loss. Its made its big open storage announcement and there are server announcements coming too. But investors have seemingly discounted these moves as the company's share price is at $3.17 with its market capitalisation at $2.34bn, about the same as its cash pile and so effectively rendering the company worthless. This is lower than the $3.62 stock price before the cuts were announced, and before a raft of technology and product announcements like the open storage one. The Register

Revolutionary new software which harnesses the power of networked computers to analyze data at high speeds is being developed by new start-up company Manjrasoft Pty Ltd and researchers within the University of Melbourne, Australia. The technology enables Cloud computing, the next generation of utility/distributed computing, supporting high speed application processing across Windows desktops and servers “Whether it be complex drug development problems, investment risk or conveyor belt logistics, the software “Aneka” offers versatility and cost savings to businesses by extracting greater productivity from existing infrastructure and data intensive applications,” said Associate Professor Raj Buyya of the University of Melbourne’s Computer Science & Software Engineering Department who has led the research. The uniqueness of the software “Aneka” (Sanskrit for ‘many in one’) offers the choice of multiple processin...

Harrah's deployment of crucial business applications on Salesforce's platform is surely one of the biggest bets to date by a major enterprise on so-called cloud computing, an information technology architecture in which third party vendors deliver software to customers over the Internet. Harrah's will rely on Force.com for applications, such as room reservations, that are directly linked to revenue generation. The applications will be used by agents based at casinos, at Harrah's 50 branch offices and by about 250 independent reps who work on behalf of the company. Among other things, the new architecture will allow reps to make room requests over the Web and receive confirmations back within hours. Additionally, airline schedules will be integrated directly into Harrah's travel management system, which will make it easier for the casino operator to schedule travel for VIP guests. Source

Vendors are gunning for diminutive businesses in the hope that as some build their small start-ups into beefy companies the bosses will stay loyal to the tech they started out with. Just don’t mention the economy, stupid. Microsoft and HP will offer US customers products, training and deployment services for storage, networking and something they have dubbed “server consolidation”. The tech beasts claimed that the tie-in will help customers decrease costs, increase biz agility, improve data access and protection, and raise employee productivity. Which is a big ask. Meanwhile, Hyper-V and MS System Centre support has been added to the industry-standard HP Virtual Connect 10Gb Flex-10 module that works with the Flex-1o NIC found, handily enough for HP, in its sparkly new ProLiant BL495c virtualisation blade server. There’s also a HP and Microsoft partner program, “Frontline”, aimed at Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Microsoft claimed that it has already registered 60 per c...

CA EITM solutions address this need for virtualization management, and deliver the following benefits, among others: Improved Agility * Provision and monitor resources in the cloud: CA Data Center Automation Manager helps consumers and providers of cloud services to deliver, scale, and manage dynamic computing resources on demand. The solution enables enterprises, Infrastructure Utility providers, business process outsourcers, and cloud computing providers to seamlessly provision and monitor cloud computing resources to allow for overflow capacity during peak demands, rapid policy-based response to business demands, more dynamic failover, and highly efficient infrastructure. * Accelerate and automate virtualized data center provisioning: CA Data Center Automation Manager empowers IT organizations to integrate and automate virtual and physical server provisioning cycles. By automatically allocating resources in real time based on business policies, customers can accelerate the ...

Chris is also brandishing a Atmos GUI management interface but I'll wait for a better screenshot. I snatched a better one from StorageZilla : Maui is policy-driven software for placing and protecting data objects. The product is simple in conception and aimed at providing vast petabyte levels of storage for cloud storage and service providers, web 2.0 companies and others needing to have a globally distributed storage resource without the complexity, EMC says, of today's SANs and NAS systems. There is no RAID, only objects and copies of objects and metadata stored on Hulk (Infiniflex 10000) arrays which have highly intelligent X86 controllers running the Atmos software and looking after dumb SATA JBODS (Just a Bunch Of Disks) connected via SAS links. Atmos stores unstructured information as objects in a global object namespace, and can scale to store billions of them in a multiple petabyte infrastructure. It has a high degree of self-management through settable policies descr...

After narrowing the field of vendors to four, "I discovered Compellent's [Eden Prairie, Minn.] virtualized SAN," Newberry says. "Compellent went beyond thin provisioning to also provide policy-based information lifecycle management, where stale data is automatically demoted to lower-performance disk drives. ... While many vendors supported such features as bolt-on afterthoughts, Compellent designed its SAN to completely automate management." By July 2007 products from Compellent and VMware had arrived. "From the box to beginning the conversion to the virtualized environment went much faster than expected," Newberry reports. "It only took days to initiate and only a few months to complete." During an otherwise uneventful deployment, a hiccup occurred when VMware's connection to the SAN destabilized. "Within minutes of my report to Compellent, they had ... isolated it to a problem with a third-party networking component," says New...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – November 4, 2008 – RightScale, Inc ., the leader in cloud computing management, announced that it has partnered with the Eucalyptus Project Team at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to foster cloud computing research, experimentation and adoption. Starting today, the RightScale cloud computing management platform is available for use with the Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC), a cluster of servers at UCSB for testing and evaluating the Eucalyptus cloud infrastructure. RightScale and the Eucalyptus Project Team are also collaborating to deliver a more robust private cloud for organizations whose testing requirements extend beyond those offered by the EPC. The RightScale-Eucalyptus partnership is aimed at making cloud computing simple and accessible to everyone from universities, students and entrepreneurs to enterprises evaluating large cloud deployments. " We are honored to collaborate with the talented UCSB Eucalyptus Project Team to a...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, November 3, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- At RealTech Middle East 2008, Pacific Controls announced that they have established a state of the art Energy Services Global Command Control Centre at their headquarters building in Techno Park, Dubai, UAE. This Energy Services Global Command Control Centre will offer their Customers, Business Partner's Government and International Agencies real time measurement and verification of carbon footprint for homes, buildings and infrastructure globally. The Energy Services Global Command Control Centre creates a new dimension in the business of carbon footprint measurement and verification. Pacific Controls has deployed their custom built high performance software platform on advanced distributed computing from "IBM" and networking technology from "CISCO" to offer ene...

And faster than you can imagine. My last keynote was a jab at the rapidly changing landscape where global economy, globalization, low-cost requirements and high ROI is driving all of us to have all the mundane things being done inside the cloud. We want to do cool stuff and forget about the rest. All a typical and even a high-end consumer needs to know is: You pay $ 29.95 / month and you have: - TV (gazillion channels but get started with a lighter version of the channel service) - Internet (actually this is the new cloud platform or intenet 2.0 on which ou get it all) - *Products (Maps, Apps, ...) - Basic edition and lots more (product development folks can define a billion services around this delivery model) - Device (Netbook, iPhone, Android-ready appliance etc) - *More cooler accessories such as Bose stuff * = Pay options could vary here. Anyways this post says it all in a different tone as well.

The news comes following Sprinx Systems’ recent presentation at Interop New York, the leading business technology event. Radko Jelinek, Sprinx’ Director of Sales, described the company’s product, positioning and timing as ideal for the American business sector. “SprinxCRM is one of the few customer relationship management systems designed with middle-market companies in mind. Our newest editions were developed to specifically address the needs of those sales-driven businesses in the U.S., through either our ‘off-the-shelf’ or customized versions. Our SprinxCRM Mobile for Windows Mobile offers solutions that are particularly exciting in light of current trends in sales and sales force management.” In anticipation of Sprinx Systems’ entry into the U.S. market, the company has established operations in California, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, as well as toll-free call center support for the continental United States. Press Release

Rackable, a leading provider of servers and storage products for large-scale data centers, today announced the availability of the Rackable Systems CloudRack(TM), a new, highly-efficient enclosure that includes one-of-a-kind rack and server designs. CloudRack's innovative new design provides one of the industry's most optimized compute and storage densities to date. Available in some of the widest ranges of configurability options on the market today, CloudRack can help cloud computing environments to scale cost effectively. "Rackable Systems continues to focus on data center density and efficiency, while offering our customers the widest possible set of configurations that fit their specific needs," said Mark Barrenechea, president and CEO of Rackable Systems. "The Rackable Systems CloudRack sets a new standard for density and configurability for cloud computing. In a 44U cabinet configuration, it can support up to 44 trays, 704 cores and 352 TBs of storage....

The big computer makers are starting to flex their muscles after ceding the early lead to smaller companies, like Fremont, Calif.-based Rackable Systems Inc. (RACK) and Verari Systems Inc. of San Diego. Both were among the first to commercialize high-density server systems. Dell has emerged as a cutting-edge player in this market, a little more than one year after creating a unit specifically tasked with developing customized products and services for "hyper-scale" data center customers. "Hyper-scale computing environments - where infrastructure deployments are measured by up to millions of servers, storage and networking equipment - are changing the way organizations are thinking about their data center requirements," said Brad Anderson, a senior vice president in Dell's business product unit. That has left H-P and IBM trying to catch up. "H-P and IBM are behind in this particular data center business," said Roger Kay of Endpoint Technology Associate...

Transcript for the whole call is here .

Saving Money Through Technology New technologies and approaches also anticipate lean times ahead. Diane Bryant, CIO of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), spoke to a global workforce increasingly collaborating and sharing data and information. The world is going green, said Bryant, and Intel's goal is to efficiently manage information and data to enable business growth and agility. Bryant outlined an approach for managing the explosion of information based on policies and procedures for information lifecycle, data, capacity, security and rights management, and engineering innovation through SAN/NAS virtualization, thin provisioning, next-generation backup and recovery, fabric unification, and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) featured a multi vendor FCoE demo, and the SNW Hands-On Labs featured FCoE exercises from Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Intel, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and QLogic (NASDAQ: QLGC). An FCoE case study presented by SNIA (Storage Networking I...

Here are the latest news on the storage vendors chasing the SMB market. I deal with a lot of SMB scenarios and know for sure that it is not just shipping offerings in the market but also articulating them to sell effectively to the customers, si the key to expanding presence together with the SMB market. The SMB market is a lot punishing and will not spare you, shoudl you screw up: Hitachi : The Hitachi AMS Series 2000 delivers up to 4x the performance compared to prior generations, and also offers storage consolidation for iSCSI, NAS, and Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) connections. The AMS Series 2000 is comprised of three models: the Hitachi AMS 2100, the Hitachi AMS 2300, and the Hitachi AMS 2500. The entire portfolio of midrange storage systems meets the benchmarking standard "Five 9's" of availability, 99.999 percent uptime. The new Hitachi AMS Series 2000 delivers the following technology breakthroughs: * The industry’s Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing C...

VMware’s Virtual Center management platform is also mature and straightforward in how an administrator can use it to control resident VMs on a VMware host. VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC) is the administrative user interface to the VMware Virtual Center platform. Microsoft’s System Center-Virtual Machine Manager (SC-VMM) 2008 (we tested a very late beta version which Microsoft guaranteed was feature complete) works with very strong ties to the underlying Active Directory and has an interface that fits right into Microsoft’s System Center scheme, so administrators won’t have to work hard to understand how it works. That said, things from standard management tasks such as viewing simple settings for a VM host to much touted advances features like the ability to migrate ESX VMs to Hyper-V caused SC-VMM to crash repeatedly during testing. Click to see: Microsoft, with its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 software, provides a centralized console for ...

IBM today opened four new cloud computing centers in emerging markets. They are in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bangalore, India; Seoul, Korea; and Hanoi, Vietnam, where there is an increasing demand for Internet-based computing models and skills to help companies compete in highly competitive environments. With previously opened centers in both emerging and mature markets, IBM now has 13 cloud computing centers, the world's largest network of expertise on cloud computing. At a time when organizations of all sizes are facing extreme data overload, skyrocketing energy costs, increasingly complex regulatory requirements and competition from more nimble economies, cloud computing is emerging as a significant shift across all industries. This computing model allows businesses and consumers alike to remotely access a vast computing resource that can be tapped on-demand to deliver next-generation services that consumers demand, like online medical records or mobile stock portfolio management. It a...