Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

AppStructure is designed to eliminate the boundaries between infrastructure, applications and services so that businesses can rapidly scale to meet time-sensitive demands, deliver software to end-users, create real-time integration with customers and partners, to provide meaningful alignment between cost and performance. AppStructure is useful for enterprises of all sizes, but especially to those organizations that view IT as a strategic function, but lack the resources to harness the combined power of this platform on their own. “The emergence of utility computing platform, developments in virtualization technologies, acceptance of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model, proliferation of Enterprise Community portal applications and the pressure to integrate various disparate applications within and outside enterprises are some of the key technology trends we’ve been tracking for some time,” said Denis Martin, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, NaviSite. “With ...

SOASTA, the leading provider of cloud-based testing solutions, today announced the successful close of $6.4 million in Series B funding. New investor, Formative Ventures, a leading early-stage venture capital firm focused on next-generation emerging technologies, led the round with continuing participation from previous investors including Canaan Partners and The Entrepreneurs’ Fund. The new funding will be used to support product enhancements, marketing, and business development efforts to address the growing demand for SOASTA’s web testing solution for Cloud Computing environments. SOASTA also announced that Clint Chao, co-founder and general partner at Formative Ventures, has been elected to the company’s board, joining Canaan Partners and The Entrepreneur’s Fund. “We’re always on the lookout for promising companies that provide a critical missing link that can serve as a catalyst for market growth,” said Clint Chao, general partner, Formative Ventures. “In SOASTA, we found a fast g...

What is Cloud Computing? Cloud computing allows you to access your data without understanding or being responsible for its infrastructure, depending on software as a service. A report published by leading analyst firm Gartner says that it’s a developing concept that combines Software as a Service, (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent Internet-based trends. At its best, cloud computing allows you to outsource your infrastructure and get rid of your IT department. Many startups use it to avoid costs. But executives have also learned that mission-critical applications can sometimes go down. Prominent outages have recently occurred at Amazon and eBay. Cloud computing is not the same as grid computing, which is simply a cluster of loosely connected computers that distribute tasks among themselves. The report, Market-Oriented Cloud Computing: Vision, Hype, and Reality for Delivering IT Services as Computing Utilities reports that many cloud computing deployments are today powered by grids, have ...

The Utility Company, an Ottawa-based IT franchising company, will begin beta-testing a new VMware-based virtualized desktop service in November and plans to release the first version of the service in early 2008. As part of the franchisor's ConnectedOffice remote management service, the first iteration of the virtualized desktop environment will place VMware virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) inside the firewall at a client site, according to The Utility Company president Mark Scott. Around mid-2008, the company will release a version of ConnectedOffice that hosts the VDI at The Utility Company's own service center. Scott, who was a founder of MSP platform vendor N-able, broke from the licensing model favored by many MSP vendors with the franchise-based company he started just a few years ago. He believes there's a compelling virtualization pitch to be made to managed services customers, one that runs counter to what he perceives as the misplaced priorities of some of The...

Gosh, since virtualization is a hot buzz word, we'll use it everywhere. Service Virtualization as a Solution At its most basic form, virtualization is an abstraction layer that decouples a resource consumer from the provider of those resources. Virtualized resources allow a single provider to support multiple consumers to achieve higher agility and reuse of those resources. In the virtual machine scenario, the physical hardware is abstracted from the operating system creating unique opportunities for design optimization. Capable of supporting multiple running instances of different operating systems on the same machine, virtual machines deliver unparalleled utilization of extra processing cycles in the data center and developer workstations. Service virtualization realizes many of the professed SOA advantages by abstracting the true service address, binding, and contract necessary to invoke business functionality at a given endpoint. An abstraction layer is also a potential platfor...

Thats exactly what this guys is talking about. I like the way Brad Shimmin of Current Analysis describes service virtualization: it's a process "where bandwidth emerges from the mist and vanishes just as mysteriously in response to provisioning rules and service-level agreements." He also is watching the growing convergence between SOA and virtualization. He describes the challenge this way: "With so much talk recently about automated biofeedback monitoring and business rules within rules, you might think that an enterprise stands as much of a chance of optimizing its service-oriented architecture applications as it does launching a Saturn V rocket. And you'd be right." Read here.

My Virtual Employer ( JupiterMedia ) will be hosting a webcast on Virtualization. All Service Managers (We have loads of them in Holland ;)) can also see the importance of Virtualization in the process architecture. I also remember talking enthusiastically to my Change Manager one time about how important it is to contain and manage changes from environment to environment (be it Test to Dev to Staging to Production). Needless to say everyone has to be on board when thinking of Virtualizing your Data Center. The data center is going virtual via the proliferation of clusters, blades and virtual-server operating systems, offering IT an opportunity to pool resources across the enterprise and manage them remotely. But for virtualization's benefits to be fully realized, a process approach is needed. This webcast might be interesting. Do check it out!