Archive for the ‘cloud’ Category

Hyper-V3 may give VMWare a run for its money this year

 

VMware has the quality, market share, and price-point of a high-end IT industry leader.  It also sits in between the hardware layer and the OS layer, a position that our friends in Redmond do not like to share with anyone if they can help it.   Looks like 2012 may be the year that Microsoft gets serious about competition in this space with HyperV3.  Some good technical stuff from Julio Urquidi  here.  Also see this good piece from Beth Pariseau for some insight into the details below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Virtualization 2012: Hyper-V 3 vs. vSphere 5 showdown looms

Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer, SearchServerVirtualization.com

Microsoft’s Hyper-V has been making steady progress catching up to VMware for years, but as IT pros look ahead into 2012, they see the battle between these two virtualization vendors heating up like never before.

In one corner: VMware vSphere 5, made generally available in August, and capable of supporting up to 1 TB of RAM and 32 virtual CPUs per virtual machine (VM). Other new features include Auto Deploy, which can automatically provision hosts according to user-defined rules; overhauled High Availability (rechristened Fault Domain Manager); policy-driven storage provisioning; and Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler.

In the other corner: Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0, still at the developer preview stage. If released as planned before the end of 2012, however, it will contain several key features to bring it into closer competition with vSphere. Those features include a new extensible virtual switch (which has received Cisco’s pledge of support), true live storage migration, shared-nothing live migration, and new scalability with up to 32 virtual CPUs and 512 GB of memory — up from a limit of 4 vCPUs and 64 GB of RAM.

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Read the full story here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at 9:05 am and is filed under application virtualization, Cisco, cloud, cool & from redmound, Cost Cutting, desktop virtualization, Disaster Recovery, Hyper-V, security, Standards, VDI, virtualization, VMware, Xen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Some really poor password choices…

For better or worse, passwords are the basis of much of the security we use in the cloud.

SplashData put out there “worst password of 2011” report, based on a blind review of their database of common passwords.  If you use any of these on any accounts you wish to protect, clearly a good idea to think about changing them soon.

  • password
  • 123456
  • 12345678
  • qwerty
  • abc123
  • monkey
  • 1234567
  • letmein
  • trustno1
  • dragon
  • baseball
  • 111111
  • iloveyou
  • master
  • sunshine
  • ashley
  • bailey
  • passw0rd
  • shadow
  • 123123
  • 654321
  • superman
  • qazwsx
  • michael
  • football

A few simple guidelines for good passwords, from around the web:

  • Use at least eight characters
  • Use a random mixture of characters, upper and lower case, numbers, punctuation, spaces and symbols.
  • Don’t use a word found in any dictionary, English or foreign.

 

Stuff that just doesn’t work well, at least not anymore, because common hacker tools know them well:

  • Don’t merely add a single digit or symbol before or after a word. e.g. “password1″
  • Don’t double a single word. e.g. “kittykitty”
  • Don’t just reverse a word. e.g. “drowssap”, or just remove the vowels. e.g. “psswrd”
  • Avoid Keyboard sequences that can easily be repeated. e.g. “qwerty”,”zxcvf” etc.
  • Don’t garble letters into numbers as the only thing between you and the dictionary, e.g. converting e to 3, L or i to 1, o to 0. as in “z3r0-10v3″

Read more about the Splashdata report in full here: http://splashdata.com/splashid/worst-passwords/index.htm

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at 9:58 am and is filed under cloud, privacy, Risk Management, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

CloudSleuth

Worth a visit is the Gomez-driven BI-based reporting tool on real time cloud performance called CloudSleuth here.  This Compuware tool provides a global window into response time and up-time by Rackspace, Google, Microsoft, and a few dozen more.  Here is an example of the response time chart, as this blog is written.  Fastest 3 are shown in the circle = click on the image to read it correctly:

 

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2011 at 8:39 am and is filed under cloud, Google, Monitoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Google, Microsoft Suffer Cloud Computing Outages

Even the big guys have not get it down quite right yet at scale:

by Clint Boulton

Cloud Computing News

Google and Microsoft both watched their cloud computing systems choke this past week, with Google Docs going dark for an hour and Microsoft Hotmail, Office 365 and SkyDrive knocked offline for three hours.

Google Sept. 7 saw its Google Docs word collaboration application [act] up for one hour, shutting out millions of users from their document lists, documents, drawings and Apps Scripts. Microsoft, meanwhile, watched its online services, including Hotmail, SkyDrive and Office 365 software, go kaput for three hours Sept. 8.

Google’s outage was caused by a memory management bug software engineers triggered in a change designed to “improve real time collaboration within the document list,” the company explained in a corporate blog post.

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Microsoft’s outage was more serious. Beginning around 9:30 PDT Sept. 8, the company’s Hotmail, SkyDrive and Office 365 services went down, owing to a Domain Name System (DNS) issue.

Read the rest at http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Google-Microsoft-Weather-Cloud-Computing-Outages-779302

 

 

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2011 at 10:25 am and is filed under cloud, Risk Management, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Feds idea seekers can advance their cloud stragegy with FedPlatform.org

The federal government continues to take a leading role in promoting and adopting cloud strategies.
Kevin L. Jackson did a nice blog piece of Fedplatform.org, worth a look here.  It’s a commercial site, but pulls together some useful pieces, like Amazon’s government specific cloud, the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy and the Federal CIO’s 25-Point Federal IT Reform Plan, and some other cool stuff

There will be lots more stuff out there, as the federal moves to the cloud continue, I suspect.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 27th, 2011 at 4:00 pm and is filed under cloud, IT Service Management, Project Management, Risk Management, security, virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Coyboy Data Doggies Ground Zero Moves to Google Apps

Wyoming Completes Google Apps Migration

Days prior to Microsoft’s Office 365 launch, the first state government to drop its in-house software in favor of Google’s cloud-computing offering announced that all 10,000 employees have made the move.

By Elizabeth Montalbano InformationWeek

June 22, 2011 04:16 PM

Wyoming has completed a migration of 10,000 employees to Google Apps for Government for collaboration and unified communications, the first state government to drop its in-house software in favor of Google’s cloud-computing offering.

“Our entire state government has gone Google,” Wyoming Governor Matt Mead said in a guest appearance on the Google Enterprise Blog. “Wyoming is the first state in the country to make this transition.”

Read the full story here.

 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011 at 2:46 pm and is filed under cloud, Cost Cutting, Disaster Recovery, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The cloud and OSS are indivisible?

 

Major early cloud implementations were built on the strength of Linux and related systems.  These technologies offered ease of porting and licensing, as well as intrinsic power and flexibility. Certainly Amazon owes a pretty huge debt to the OSS community.

But many raise valid concerns about how SaaS / PaaS / Iaas solutions can lead to vendor lock-in, despite the OSS root that many of these technologies have.  Eric Knorr recently published a blog on-point to this issues, here is a piece of it below, read the full piece here.  I call attention especially to the Apache Hadoop notes near the bottom of the piece, this technology is riding high on the Gartner hype curve just now, as a way to deal with the challenges of Big Data.

 

Why the cloud can’t be separated from open source

By Eric Knorr
Published on InfoWorld (http://www.infoworld.com)

Created 2011-05-16 03:33AM

Open source wouldn’t exist without the Internet — so perhaps it was inevitable that open source would get mashed up with cloud computing.

It’s been that way from the start. Since the very beginning of cloud computing, SaaS providers have tended to prefer the LAMP stack (or some variation) to deliver Web applications. But over the past few years, there has also been a precipitous rise in the number of open source cloud projects.

According to Black Duck, which maintains a huge open source knowledge base, the number of open source cloud projects rose from a handful in 2005 to 470 by the end of 2010. That’s a tiny percentage of the half-million projects out there, but their influence vastly outweighs their number.

…[lots of good stuff here on many OSS tools in this space, go to his full blog entry to read about it]…

Finally, there’s Apache Hadoop, a software framework for data-intensive distributed applications inspired by Google MapReduce. Hadoop is ushering in a revolution in mining gobs of unstructured data, from Web clickstreams to security event logs. Although Hadoop is not restricted to the cloud, it’s certainly the perfect bursty application. Amazon EC2, for example, offers a hosted Hadoop framework dubbed Amazon Elastic MapReduce; upload the data, use scores of EC2 servers, and walk away with the results without having to pay a dime for infrastructure.

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This article, “Why the cloud can’t be separated from open source,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog.

Read the whole piece here:  http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/why-the-cloud-cant-be-separated-open-source-077

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2011 at 9:07 am and is filed under cloud, databases, FOSS and friends, outsourcing builds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Things are finally starting to “open up” a bit for the mobile computing user

Mobility is one of ways to enjoy the power of cloud, anywhere. For those who believe competition and technology openness are vital to advancing our industry, the reign of Apple as the sole provider of viable cutting edge tablets has been a tense time. Perhaps we are seeing some open and competitive light at the end of long night. Finally.

Meet the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer. This is the first Honeycomb tablet I have seen with a release date I can find in this month’s day planner (shipped in UK last month, instant sell out there they say, ships in US next Tue through Best Buy) that does some stuff that the ipad2 does not yet do, as far as I know. And for less than the iPad by a few dollars, the Wi-Fi model runs $399.

Early review here: http://www.slashgear.com/asus-eee-pad-transformer-first-impressions-video-30143387/, and ship dates here: http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/04/21/asus-eee-pad-transformer-to-hit-us-stores-april-26th-for-399/

What I thought was novel about this (besides its running an open platform as opposed to a closed one) was the smart docking station. This thing it plugs into is more than a keyboard, it contains lots of extra ports and storage and things, and interestingly, also an extra battery, so that the tablet only battery life of 9 hours gets moved to a very nice 16 hours.

The big concept here is that the device can handle content creation chores, and as well as the content display stuff that the current Apple generation does so well. It lacks a 4G option, which is a big hole; though they say they will be adding it.

One silly thing I saw that is cool enough to close with: when the weather report changes from cloudy to sunny, the wallpaper changes from clouds to sunny too. Let that light shine on me!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Photo credit: David Lienhard, "blue sky over st. gallenkirch"]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 10:15 pm and is filed under cloud, FOSS and friends, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

How Private Clouds Can Ramp to Public Clouds

 

On-Premise Private Clouds: Effective On-Ramp to Cloud Computing Adoption

An Interview By: Elizabeth White of Cloud Computing Journal with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan

Apr. 6, 2011 10:38 AM

“Cloud computing has evolved from a point product solution that addressed a particular pain point (for example, high performance computing grids designed to analyze massive data sets) to an integrated and key component of a whole product solution designed to address a broad array of computing challenges for the enterprise,” noted Thomas Bryant, Director of Advanced Technology & Products for Quest Software, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Bryant concluded that “The best of today’s cloud computing environments enable enterprises to leverage their existing infrastructure investments more efficiently and easily integrate with existing processes and management solutions.”

Read the whole interview here: http://www.sys-con.com/node/1783287

 

 


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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 at 1:31 am and is filed under cloud, Open Source, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Briefing the CEO About Cloud Computing: Some CIO Guidelines

Getting the upstream message right is a big part of the CIO’s job description.

Jeanne Harris and Allan Alter of the Accenture Institute for High Performance do a nice job in this piece describing some of the key things to focus on, especially when it comes to ROI analysis.

Excerpt below.

 

 

What You Should Tell Your CEO About Cloud Computing

By Jeanne G. Harris, Allan E. Alter
2011-03-28

…At a time when companies’ use of clouds is just getting started, the chief information officer’s judgment and store of knowledge are invaluable assets. These are especially important when the CIO sets out to educate that most important stakeholder of all, the chief executive officer.

First Requirement: Master the Facts

One place where you can begin this all-important dialogue is by demonstrating a balanced, clear-minded understanding of the business case for cloud computing. That includes a realistic view of the savings from clouds. Moving to the cloud always means automatic savings. In fact, one study of those who adopt software-as-a-service found that only about half get a positive return on their investment; a quarter end up spending more than they expect.

A discussion like this with the CEO has the advantage of signaling that you are attuned to business issues and of demonstrating a predisposition to facts over hype.

Indeed, if the CIO is to be the IT person who leads the cloud charge at a company, this is really the first requirement: Knowing the facts.

Knowing the facts means developing a dossier about what some leading companies are doing with the cloud. The activities of competitors and business partners should be included as part of that intelligence…

Read the whole piece here: http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/What-You-Should-Tell-Your-CEO-About-Cloud-Computing-795154/

 

About the authors

Jeanne G. Harris is a senior executive research fellow with the Accenture Institute for High Performance, and is based in Chicago. Allan E. Alter is a research fellow with the Accenture Institute for High Performance and a former executive editor of CIO Insight.  He is based in Boston.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 at 6:24 pm and is filed under cloud, IT Service Management, security, virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.