Cloud Head

Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Bursts Into the Cloud

July 19th, 2011

Had the chance to spend the better part of the week last week with Microsoft drinking deeply from the Redmond kool-aid cup in LA at WPC2011. To be honest, I was impressed with their technology moves on many fronts. I guess a $9B/year R&D budget can push out some impressive stuff, when focused right. They are no-joke serious about the cloud, although their vision is a hybrid world as far as the eye can see, and you’d expect. Hard to argue with that, near term, I’d say.

One random item that impressed me was progress they’d made on public and private cloud integration with the high performance computing tools (Windows HPC Server 2008 R2). Four things stood out. First, was the ability to burst to Azure, now central to the product. Second, was the ability to leverage unused Windows 7 desktop PC CPU power, which for an Enterprise or a University or some other facility with lots of systems that do little at night could be huge . Third, MSFT has tied HPC fully into Excel 2010, allowing the building of some impressive front ends with even more impressive backends. Lastly, they had some algorithms to keep up with Mapreduce.

Here is a glimpse of the pieces and how they go together:

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, HPC, Hyper-V 2.0, Microsoft
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Coyboy Data Doggies Ground Zero Moves to Google Apps

June 23rd, 2011

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.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Google, security, TopLine Strategies
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Microsoft tidies up its cloud licensing programs

June 2nd, 2011

After a long two years of wondering, the Redmond team finally cleats up some of the uncertainty around how its Windows products and related tools function in the cloud environment, such as Amazons. All I can say is, about time the guesswork ended. Here’s a snippet from Carl Brooks with the details.

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Microsoft formalizes cloud computing enterprise licensing

Carl Brooks, Senior Technology Writer, SearchCloudComputing .com

Nearly two years after enterprise customers were given sanctioned Windows Server virtual machines to run in Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud and other services, Microsoft has adjusted its enterprise volume licensing to allow for “license mobility.”

We’re trying to do this in a way that’s very straightforward to let people know where they are.

Andrew Wolfe, worldwide licensing project manager for Microsoft

Microsoft applications bought through volume licensing agreements — such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Lync Server, System Center and Dynamics CRM — can now move to dynamic virtual environments like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud if enterprises purchase Software Assurance (SA) for those licenses.

There are also updates to Service Provider License Agreements (SPLA) for Microsoft. The company said the licenses will provide “confidence” when contemplating using cloud services. Customers call it playing catch-up.

Read the rest at: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240036188/Microsoft-formalizes-cloud-computing-enterprise-licensing

Tags: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, cloud, cloud computing, Microsoft, virtualization
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The cloud and OSS are indivisible?

May 16th, 2011

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.

…

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

Tags: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Big Data, cloud, cloud computing, Gartner, Hadoop, IaaS, Open Source, oss, PaaS, SaaS, strategy
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Things are finally starting to “open up” a bit for the mobile computing user

April 21st, 2011

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"]

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, mobile, strategy
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Competitive Differentiation, the Cloud, and the Role of the CIO

April 14th, 2011

One of the things I recall from B-School was the potentially inverse relationship between levels of LOB industry IT systems standardization on the one hand (generally a good thing) and levels of strategic business competitive differentiation (also a good thing, for the most part) on the other. Another way of saying this – the more that every firm in a given sector uses the same scalable and cost effective IT technology, the less of an advantage using that technology provides for ‘being special’ in the market (woe to he that is still using Wordperfect 6.0 for legal memos, of course, falling too far behind still can be quite bad).

Cloud computing environments, where so much application and systems infrastructure may actually be shared with competitors (in a sense even co-owned) may be a perfect case in point. Chris Romano of Law Technology News put out a nice piece on that topic; with respect to how the cloud may impact law firm CIO’s. I excerpt the first portion of his article below, check out the whole piece here.

In the cloud era, we need to find ways of being differentiated that are not just based on better systems than the next guy. Can I hear you say “better client service,” for example?

“As Law Firms Fly Into Cloud Computing, Will CIOs Matter?

Chris Romano

Law Technology News

April 14, 2011

When Harvard Business Review published Nicholas Carr’s 2004 book, Does IT Matter?, the reaction was incendiary. Carr argued that technological, economic, and competitive forces were combining to transform the role IT plays in business, and that technology had become a commodity that doesn’t provide competitive advantages. Two Harvard business professors were among the many readers who declared Carr, in essence, clueless.

At the time, the legal IT community was not amused. How dare he! We support vast infrastructures with multiple application platforms used by highly intellectual users. To show Carr how wrong he was we invested in greener data centers, virtualization, and, of course, cloud computing.

But Carr’s controversial commentary resonates even more strongly today. In fact, let’s update the original question, “Does IT Matter,” to “Do CIOs Matter?” Cloud computing (where firms use web-based software maintained by the vendor) is the antithesis of Carr’s basic premise that scarcity of a function provides a competitive advantage. With cloud computing, firms do not need scores of IT personnel to install, deploy, permission, upgrade, integrate, and repair every technology the firm wants its personnel to use. The cloud makes law firms small and large citizens of the cyber world…”

Read the full story here.

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Briefing the CEO About Cloud Computing: Some CIO Guidelines

March 30th, 2011

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.

Tags: CEO, cio, cloud, cloud computing, CTO, Internet, security
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IBM making moves towards private cloud with Tivoli Updates

March 10th, 2011

Carl Brooks of searchCloudComputing.com just put out an interesting piece on IBM’s updating as Tivoli as a complement and perhaps a replacement for VMware in the building of private clouds. The industry seems to be taking some notice of IBM’s approach to the cloud, finally.

IBM

Did IBM just change the game in private cloud?

By Carl Brooks, Senior Technology Writer

02 Mar 2011 | searchCloudComputing.com

Does IBM have the wherewithal to compete in the commodity hardware cloud?

Say “IBM” and “cloud computing” in the same breath and many IT managers will roll their eyes. The IT leader’s cloud strategy has been seen by many as a mess.

But that may be about to change. IBM recently revealed a beta program of updates to its Tivoli software that may breathe new life into the company’s private cloud ambitions.

The new capabilities include support for VMware’s VIM APIs in a variety of Tivoli tools, including image repositories, automated provisioning, application deployment and Tivoli Storage Manager (integrating TSM and VMware heretofore has not been pretty). Enhancements to Tivoli Provisioning Manager may include booting VMware images directly from block storage instead of having them preloaded into memory. IBM claims that images can be booted in seconds.

Read the rest here.

Carl Brooks is the Senior Technology Writer for SearchCloudComputing.com. Contact him at cbrooks@techtarget.com.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, IBM, security, SOA, strategy, virtualization, VMware
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