Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

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...

US-based software maker VMware plans to more than double its research and development staff in China within 18 months, despite the economic slowdown. "China is one of the fastest growing markets for us and the fundamentals for the market will remain strong," said Mike Clayville, vice-president and general manager of VMware. "We are going to increase the R&D staff here up to 300 within 18 months as well as strengthen our field resources dramatically." The company pioneered the market for virtualization technology, which helps a single computer server handle the work of several servers. According to Clayville, the technology could reduce a customers' hardware expenses by as much as 90 percent and energy use up to 88 percent. As a result of the global economic crisis, many businesses are expected to resort to cost-cutting measures, which may boost demand for technologies such as virtualization, analysts said. Source

Although I would also have loved to have the author: Ask me in advance (Obviously I'd have obliged) Told me later (instead of me looking into my logs to find where the link came from) Maybe, just maybe, thanked me as well Nevertheless, it is good to be mentioned (and get unjar'ed while I'm emitting) :-) The Economist page where you can read the snippet, and obviously I downloaded the full copy. Here is the detailed acknowledgment page on sources the author used to write the report.

IDC reporting: “The cloud model offers a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT - in an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage will be greatly magnified. This advantage is especially important for small and medium businesses, a sector that will be key target in any plan for recovery.” Three market forces are helping drive the shift toward cloud computing, according to IDC: the search for growth (and revenues) in important new segments, including emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) as well as the small and medium business sector; the shortcomings of traditional approaches in capturing the growth in these increasingly important markets; and competitive pressures from new players with little to lose and everything to gain from pushing the new model. Source

I have my own doubts and opinions on how IDC came up with that figure and what actually accounts for a "real sell on virtualization" against a "mere add-on" which is barely used by those freebie collectors. My detailed analysis will come when I'll find that IDC contact and drill him/her on how they came to that figure. For now Mike did some hardwork to look back at those figures: As with most analyst reports this one was sponsored. IDC won't give up the name of who actually sponsored it but I can tell you it wasn't VMware and the ones that did sponsor it are a competitor in Redmond. That's just fine that people sponsor reports and I would have no issue with it as long as the information was accurate . When the firm putting out the report just publishes inaccurate or incomplete date then they look as foolish as Forrester did when they wrote about Open Source adoption . I'm actually surprised that Matt Asay didn't pick up on the inaccuracies in...

Virtualization is the number-one strategic technology for 2009, Gartner said at its Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. this week. Gartner analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends it predicts will be strategic for most organizations, defining "strategic technology" as having the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Taking it a step further, Gartner defines "significant impact" to include factors such as high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. Gartner said the technologies impact an organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable a strategic advantage from early adoption. "Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organization," said David Cearley, vice president and distin...

This might be pretty handy: We at govirtual.org are devoted to facilitating research and instruction on virtualization related topics by enabling the sharing of ideas, results, materials, and tools among members of the community . Our goal is to be the comprehensive resource and knowledge base you can count on to find the latest research and interact with the leading researchers in the field. This goal can only be achieved with your participation. We hope you will share your courseware , tools , and papers and that you'll participate in discussions . go to the site here

Tier-1 global service providers such as Accenture, ACS, Cognizant, Capgemini, CSC, EDS, Genpact, HP, IBM, Infosys, LogicaCMG, TCS, Satyam and Wipro continue to increase their global presence. The difference is that service providers such as IBM and Accenture are looking to tier-2 and tier-3 Indian cities for expansion, while the Indian providers Infosys, TCS and Wipro are heading toward cities in South America and Eastern Europe. In a way, the choice of the right city has become more important than the choice of the country. It is rather the city (than the country), which represents a more accurate package of attributes that service providers seek. Thus, Cebu City and Monterrey matter more than the Philippines and Mexico from a decision-making standpoint. This study identifies those locations that are globally recognized for their “specific” outsourcing services offerings as well as the ones that are establishing themselves as specialized locations for particular outsourcing functions....

The Architecture Cloud AV is the future in Anti virus technology .Soon desktop anti virus software could become history. Here’s are the details .Currently Anti virus software is installed on every end users machine in an organization. This limits only one anti virus could be installed one system. Every anti virus package has some vulnerability and if the hacker is able to exploit it, the organization’s security is compromised. Statistics show that F-Secure have a detection rate of 86% whereas McAfee only detects 54% pf the viruses. Also they have a slow response time to a solution to a new virus. Thus newer virus often takes days before they are detected. On an average, a new virus is undetected for almost seven weeks. Cloud AV moves the anti virus functionality into the “network cloud” and off personal computers. Cloud AV analyzes suspicious files using multiple anti virus and behavioral detection programs simultaneously. Typical AV vendors fail and are themselves suceptible to atta...

Naveen Mishra, Senior Analyst-Servers of Gartner finds that the market size is very small at this point in time, but the growth in the coming months and years will be rapid. While there is no sequential pattern observed in the adoption of virtualization-no pattern exists for server, storage, desktop, application or other infrastructure virtualization-a close observation shows that it is primarily servers that have caught up and storage virtualization is witnessed in the datacentre environment in the Unix space. However, the emerging trend is x86 server virtualization, which most companies including Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix etc., are driving consciously with their products and solutions. The virtualization scenario is currently purely need-based and is a priority area for CIOs for areas where it proves itself with benefits. For instance, at Gati Ltd., G S Ravi Kumar, CIO has gone in for storage virtualization as a first ste...

Yankee has laid off about 40% of its analysts. And there are rumors that they're up for sale, although it really makes no sense if you have distanced yourself from your powerful workforce. That is your bloodline, maybe there are buyers who are willing to skin an empty carcass!

This is like telling someone politely to "use their imagination". Virtualization may be a great to consolidate your assets and pack them up in lesser space but no oen can save you from the lack of certain critical skills. Comprised of feedback from over 1,000 respondents within more than 800 different government, enterprise and small-to-medium organizations worldwide, only 21 percent of 759 respondents currently deploying virtualization have any kind of systems management solution for their virtual infrastructure. Overall, survey responses demonstrate that: * Approximately 27 percent are managing the performance and availability of their virtual systems with the same tools they utilize on their physical servers; * Just 17 percent are simply monitoring the virtual hardware or the operating system; and * Only 10 percent are proactively gauging end-user response time while 15 percent are simply considering it. The survey also revealed that 40 percent of respondents are ...

"ACM SIGKDD is pleased to present Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan with its 2008 Innovation Award for his important contributions to the advancement of the data mining and knowledge discovery," said Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, chair of ACM SIGKDD. "Dr. Ramakrishnan's visionary research on techniques for scaling data mining algorithms to large datasets, and on mining ordered and streaming data has significantly influenced ongoing developments in the industry." The award is given to one individual or one group of collaborators who has made significant technical innovations in the field of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery that have been transferred to practice in significant ways, or that have significantly influenced direction of research and development in the field. The previous ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award winners include Rakesh Agrawal (IBM), Jerome Friedman (Stanford University), Heikki Mannila (Helsinki University of T...

So Gartner, the largest technology adviser to corporations, is saying the corporate shift to cloud computing is underway and destined to be a highly disruptive force in the industry. That struck me as intriguing, since a rapid advance of cloud computing into the corporate world is not a given, despite the consumer success of cloud-based services like Google, Facebook and others. On Tuesday, I caught up with Mr. Tully, who is based in London, and asked him to elaborate on his cloud computing comments. “On one level,” he said, “this whole cloud thing is about shifting assets away from enterprises and to service providers.” That, Mr. Tully added, should mean strong growth for corporate service providers. So far, there have been a few cloud-model corporate service suppliers, like Salesforce.com, and announced plans and investments by big corporate technology vendors like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and EMC. Internet giants like Google and Amazon.com are are offering some corp...

This one is pretty optimistic about India: Two other Indian cities also made it to the top 10 list--New Delhi edged out Manila for the number two spot, while Mumbai dropped three places from last year's list to seventh. Jenna Griffin, senior research analyst for global delivery services research at IDC Asia-Pacific, told ZDNet Asia that Bangalore and New Delhi were attractive due to existing infrastructure, large quantity of skilled workers as well as competitive pricing. She noted, however, that the appreciating rupee was eroding the cost arbitrage. Auckland and Beijing made significant progress over last year, moving up five and three notches, respectively. Griffin said Auckland's ranking was influenced by factors such as greater government support, an increased emphasis toward a digital economy and currency depreciation. On the other hand, the investment into Beijing's infrastructure and the environment for the upcoming Olympic Games has sharpened the city's competit...

I am getting several call from industry leaders within large customer ranks who want to really know what Gartner is really doing and how they can utilize better, real-time and on-the-field researches/road-warriors to get the information that really matters to them. I will be doing a couple of analyst calls in the coming weeks and will post the results here.

So maybe IBM is just waiting for that 360 degrees turnaround of the market and we'll all go back to the time-sharing age. We are absolutely seeing interest in mainframes from clients who want to use more virtualisation," says Roy Illsley, a senior research analyst with Butler Group. "It's not an approach for everyone but, done well, it can reduce power consumption and footprint, improve reliability and provide a lot of value to the business." Although virtualisation is most often discussed in terms of Wintel and Unix servers, the idea of consolidating many workloads onto a single machine and creating 'virtual partitions' was invented on the mainframe in 1967, says Carl Greiner, an analyst with Ovum. "This isn't a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, and virtualisation has always been done on mainframes." The key advantage of using a mainframe for virtualisation is that it improves performance, says James Governor, ...

We have raised the bar of analysis by doing it on a day to day basis. Suddenly with this agile, liquid and rather volatile economy, a report that is 6-weeks late is really not useful to the industry, especially if you look at IT and the "current state of IT". I raised this question in LinkedIn and have re-opened the question. Here's this blogger talking about Gartner and what they really do: There are themes at Gartner and its competitors -- ideas that are presented on an almost seasonal basis like adding fins to change a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker into a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker. Two such themes that are popular with such consultants right now are offshoring/outsourcing and getting rid of legacy applications to gain agility, whatever that is. I've written columns and columns about offshoring and outsourcing and the success of both policies is decidedly mixed, unless perhaps you are outsourcing down the street and offshoring Lake Michigan. Outsourcing, while a very ...

Hmm, not a really promising figure that. So it is safe to assume that the desktop virtualization is a hype and will/can eventually cost you more dollars than the current setup. Think about it: The chips are getting energy efficient and fast, the disks are getting cooler and cheaper. And to play the devil's advocate here, then you have a consultant who's blowing hose in your ears telling you that your desktop is really better off being hosted on some distant, remote, out-sourced server? (Do bear with me as I am exaggerating here) But that "conservative figure" of $1.8Bn is not really excitable, far from it. I've heard numbers , back in 2007, to be in the range of $ 1.5 Bn as well.

LAS VEGAS – April 29, 2008 – At TechWeb’s Software 2008, Stratavia ™, the leading provider of data center automation software for Fortune 1000 organizations, today announced the results of a study it sponsored, conducted by research firm, Enterprise Management Associates . The survey revealed insights from 169 IT professionals from organizations with over $100 million in annual revenues. The research results indicate the biggest single cost factor in enterprise data centers is staffing expenses, as companies experience skills shortages, difficulties attracting and retaining staff, high error rates from manual intervention and language issues when outsourcing offshore. Findings include: · The biggest single cost factor in enterprise data centers is staffing costs. Over 35% of respondents believe that this is the largest single cost in operating and managing their data center – more than hardware (26%), more than software (22%), and five times as much as a current ‘hot’...