Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Merrill Lynch recently issued a research note: “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at stake” (07 May 2008). The analysts write that by 2011 the volume of cloud computing market opportunity would amount to $160bn, including $95bn in business and productivity apps (email, office, CRM, etc.) and $65bn in online advertising. The authors identify 10 companies + 2 “unconventional plays” with exposure to Cloud Computing growth. Source

Here'e the program: Emerging paradigms for software products/solutions August 23, 2008, 10am, @ Google, Hyderabad Experts from Hyderabad, Bangalore, and US will share their perspectives and experiences with Virtualization, SaaS and PaaS. Sessions will include cloud evolution, infrastructure & tools, design patterns and case studies. Cloud Evolution An overview of SaaS Infrastructure, Platforms, applications and tools options. Infrastructure & tools An introduction to infrastructures on which cloud computing runs: Google Application Engine, Process Factory, and Microsoft Live Mesh. Design Patterns An introduction to frameworks which provide tools to create and deploy applications: SQL abstraction on Web-based SaaS solutions. Case Studies A presentation on the business applications used for the personal or business productivity: Case Study on re-engineering a financial solution for SaaS. Speakers: Jinesh Varia (Evangelist-Amazon(USA)), Prof.Vasudeva Varma(IIIT-Hyderabad), and...

New technology can counter the security risks posed by cloud computing, reports SC Magazine. Security issues with cloud computing have been highlighted by a US military science professor at the Defcon security convention recently. In May, ISACA found that information security management, along with regulatory compliance and the challenges of managing IT risks, were uppermost in members minds when it comes to security in a poll. Utilising IT to cut costs Organisations keep looking for new ways to bring down costs. Leveraging IT effectively can be one way of achieving this objective, reports CXO Today. More here

The Department of Defense, through DISA, provides advanced information technology and immediate communications support to the president, vice president, secretary of defense, military services and combatant commands. DISA offers solutions and enhanced capabilities that enable its customers to make rapid decisions using real-time information and turn these decisions into critical strategic, operational and tactical actions (see www.disa.mil). DISA's cloud computing infrastructure, known as RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment), will serve a potential user base of around three million DOD personnel, enabling users to describe their computing needs and gain rapid access to a fully functional environment. The requesting personnel will utilize a custom version of Moab Access Portal for Clouds™ to graphically request resources from anywhere with Web access. The portal interfaces with Moab Cloud Service™, which analyzes information collected from HP and government tools to evaluate re...

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 ...

Honestly I didn't notice a outage. In the last year, the idea of "cloud computing" -- the transition of desktop computing functions like email and word processing to external servers managed by tech giants -- has gained an enormous amount of traction. Today, most tech observers agree that in the future, much of our data will be stored in "the cloud," a vast network of inter-connected web-based servers far removed from individual users. But several recent high-profile outages of popular web-based services, including Twitter, Amazon's S3 storage system, Apple's MobileMe web software suite, and now Google's Gmail, raise serious questions about the reliability of cloud computing. (After a 90-minute, apparently system-wide outage, Google said the problem was fixed.) The GMail outage affected millions of users in the middle of Monday afternoon. Consumers and businesses weighing whether to use Google's online suite of tools, Google Docs, have taken no...

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

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

Viyya Technologies Inc. (PINKSHEETS: VYON), a developer and marketer of advanced web-based content management applications, today announced a strategic partnership with Xandros, Inc., the leading provider of custom OEM Linux solutions, next-generation Linux desktop and server products, and advanced cross-platform Windows-Linux management tools. The agreement gives Xandros exclusive rights to bundle Viyya(TM) technology with Xandros' custom OEM solutions to meet the needs of the growing number of users of Linux-based internet connected desktop and mobile devices. Available as an optional feature in Xandros' custom OEM solutions, Viyya technology will also be offered through CNR technology at http://www.cnr.com, where Linux users can freely download hundreds of software and web applications with a single click. "Cloud-based services and content access play an important role in the next-generation Linux-based netbooks and mobile internet devices," said Andreas Typaldos, ...

One of AT&T's first customers is the U.S. Olympic Committee. The organization, which runs teamusa.org and other Olympics Web sites, knows traffic will leap this month as fans watch videos and look up event results and then drop sharply as soon as the games are over. It plans to use the AT&T service to increase its network bandwidth temporarily. Jim Paterson, a vice president of product development at AT&T, said another type of business that could benefit from cloud computing would be an e-commerce retailer that sees a spike in activity on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Mr. Paterson said companies can cut networking and storage costs by as much as 30% with a cloud-based service. WSJ

We did see Dell's name come up in the Group discussion earlier but Dell continues to attempt to get the TM on the Cloud Computing. Two giants of the computing industry have demonstrated their own commitment to ‘cloud computing’ a week after a joint research project from HP, Intel and Yahoo! was unveiled. IBM today revealed plans to spend $350m on two high-density cloud computing platforms in Tokyo and North Carolina. The facilities will be 50% more efficient than standard data centres, the company said, thanks to extensive server consolidation. Meanwhile, it emerged today that computer manufacturer Dell has filed an application in the US to trademark the phrase ‘cloud computing’. More here

Though running Citrix XenApp 4.5 - formerly Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 - on XenServer 4.1, the new virtualization platform from Citrix, might be a likely topic for a Citrix Training Center blog, today the Citrix story I have to tell is actually about running XenApp 4.5 on VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3), because that’s what the customer was doing. Apparently there’s a new industry coming up that is projected to bloom into a hundred and sixty billion dollar industry, soon, called “infrastructure on demand”. The task was to create a “button” to press that would provision Citrix server vm’s, apps installed, Citrix software installed, configuration complete and documented, immediately, and while many of my peers approach this from a scripting point of view, with Windows sysprep utility and Enteo software complicating the process, I decided to see if I could get a citrix-vm clone going, having been hanging around training centers for the past 15 years and dealing with ghost issu...

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...

Vienna, Va. – June 02, 2008 – StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT Operations teams, announced today the external infrastructure connectivity upgrade to its staging and testing solution, StackSafe TM Test Center. The solution creates a virtual copy of the software infrastructure stack and enables IT Operations teams to better test the impact of changes before releasing them to the production environment, reducing the uncertainty and downtime related to IT changes. With this upgrade, the virtualized Test Center environment can be extended to interact with non-virtualized system components that reside outside of the Test Center environment – enabling test scenarios across the entire end-to-end IT service. “ Virtualization technology offers the potential to deliver time-stressed, resource-thin IT operations staff a low risk way to test and assess the impact of making changes to the IT production environment,” commented Richard Ptak, Fo...

A perfect story of a client becoming a competitor! Look at this, isn't it what you always wanted. Credit Suisse has made a strong statement to the market and it is: Times A'Wastin', Ladies! We'll do it ourselves and then you can chase us! Look at the logical architecture, workflow and multi-virtualization vendor management orchestration: New York, New York, June 2, 2008 - Credit Suisse announced today that it is launching an independent company to market an innovative virtual machine management application . The company, DynamicOps LLC , formed in January, 2008, is funded by Credit Suisse's NEXT II venture group and is located in Burlington, Massachusetts. Credit Suisse first deployed a virtual infrastructure in 2005, and realized that while virtualization improved resource utilization and business agility, it also increased operational complexity. VRM was initially developed by Credit Suisse's Global Research and Development Group, headed by Steve Yat...

This is not necessarily so for IT operations. Managing VMware is only part of the story. Instead, VMware alters the way that IT operations manage their infrastructures and applications. In doing so, it has become apparent that the old approaches to systems management are not up to the task. This paper discusses these challenges and describes NetIQ’s approach to Operational VMware Management, an approach that addresses the hybrid physical/virtual environment. Get the whitepaper here...

This article comes just about in time. today I was having a discussion with my colleague about why we should start putting the security and start hardening the ESX hypervisor against any malicious attacks/hacks. I (and some other colleagues) have rewritten our "Virtualization: Design Guide" completely and I was the guy pushing the security into our every other deployments. There is one thing for sure: "There will be a breach somewhere, The 451Group has predicted that a malicious ESX hack is coming, Joanna did also talk about the Escape phenomena. I think the thinning of the TSA (Threat Surface Area) with ESX 3i will help the decrease the chances of the attack/hack getting thinner but a mere statement that: "Since the TSA footprint is much smaller, we are a lot safer than yesterday" is like hoping that a nuclear warhead will not hit your country since you are so small, and trust me you will feel nuked when that happens in your data center! So my adivce to all f...

"Since our software replicates the server, and clones everything from the software to the server identity and all data between the two machines, there's just maybe a 15-second [downtime] window in a failover situation," John Posovatz, Neverfail's vice president of product management, told InternetNews.com. The software provides centralized monitoring, remote management and fast provisioning capabilities, and serves as the control point for services such as VMware VMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). VMotion enables live virtual machines to be migrated between physical servers, while DRS dynamically allocates capacity within a group of VMware ESX Server hosts. More here...

Well that is what these guys did. Do note that they were all DAS (my version of Virtualization 1.0). you knew that RAID 5, 6 or even 10 is still a sort or virtualization, right? "Direct attach storage was not a good way to allocate disk space. We had files spread out all over the place. We knew we had the disk capacity we needed but it did not quite work out: we had a haphazard approach with files stored all over the place and plenty of work moving them around," a situation that was less than optimal for the company's fleet of home-grown applications and the SQL Server database supporting them. The obvious answer was a storage area network (SAN), which O'Connell quickly decide must use Internet Protocol connectivity. "Fibre Channel is more expensive to get into," he says. "There is a lot more equipment to buy. So we started looking at iSCSI and saw that EqualLogic was backed by Microsoft. Then we saw a demonstration of their array and fell in love w...

They plan to do this on Monday. John Posavatz, Neverfail vice president for product marketing told IT PRO its VMware using customers found an increasing reliance on VirtualCentre features like VMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to manage their virtual environments had introduced a single point of failure. VMware VMotion enables the migration of live virtual machines between physical servers and VMware DRS dynamically allocates and balances computing capacity within a group of VMware ESX Server hosts. Link