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This Week in Cloud: Top 10 Apps for Cloud, Private Cloud Implementation Issues
Feature Article
Using Metrics to Better Discover, Manage and Measure Services
By Erik Hille, CA Technologies
The increased focus on cloud computing and IT supply chain management has also driven a renewed interest in "services" for many companies. At issue is how companies can understand the performance of their existing business and services so that these new delivery mechanisms can be incorporated as part of the overall delivery model.
I recently delivered a speech on the many ways that organizations attempt to leverage measurements to make sense of the business. Unfortunately, while the use of measurements is plentiful, few of them truly measure the correct things. Read the full article.
Cloud News
- New research confirms that cloud computing is more energy-efficient than traditional computing. The research study, which was sponsored by Microsoft, reports that savings of 30 – 90 percent can be realized, and that the greatest energy and greenhouse reductions are achieved by businesses with less than 100 employees. This CNET article provides more detail.
- Microsoft and EMC partnered to develop a reference architecture designed to help customers move to private cloud. A virtualized infrastructure leveraging EMC Symmetrix VMAX, Windows Server R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V can scale to support 1,024 virtual machines, according to this Information Week article.
- Riverbed Technology announced Cloud Steelhead, wide-area-networking optimization software to ensure the network performance of applications hosted in the cloud, according to this Reseller News article. The software currently works with Amazon EC2 and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), but will work with other cloud providers in the future.
- IBM is working with 14 European partners to develop a new type of storage architecture for the cloud, according to this ZDNet article. The goal of the VISION cloud initiative is to provide ‘content centric’ access to data, so that the display varies depending on who is accessing the information.
- As part of the UP 2010 Conference this week, several cloud companies were crowned Up-Start 2010 Award winners. The most promising startups were StorSimple (judges’ choice) and CloudSwitch (attendee choice). The judges chose beyondCORE as most innovative cloud company; attendees were split between Pareto Networks and Salesforce.com for Chatter, so both were designated winners.
Upcoming Cloud Events
- DreamForce 2010, December 6 – 9, San Francisco, California
- Gartner Data Center Conference, December 6 – 9, Las Vegas, Nevada
- Cloud Connect, March 7 – 10, Santa Clara, California
Cloud Views
- This Computerworld article titled “Moving to a private cloud: technology choices and implementation issues” describes some of the questions you should ask when preparing for private cloud and describes a private cloud implementation at Suncorp. The article describes important considerations for managing private clouds (such as: consider management tools that bridge physical and virtual environments and that can manage multiple hypervisors from a single interface), and discusses the pros and cons of commercial, homegrown and open-source tools.
- This TechRepublic article describes the 10 applications you can move to the cloud now: email, conferencing software, CRM, web hosting, development test labs, video hosting, email security, common application components, basic office applications and batch processing applications.
- Amazon announced that it is now offering the Cluster GPU Instance, which delivers supercomputer calculation power for as little as $2.10 an hour. It employs the same Tesla processor used in the fastest supercomputers, according to this Sys-con article. The article also explores the dark side of this new offering, which can be exploited by hackers to crack passwords. Shortly after the service was announced, security blogger Thomas Roth wrote an entry showing how he used the service to create a password “hash cracker” that could crack a six character password in 49 minutes (and by spending only $1.71 with Amazon’s service.)
