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Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

The Last NASA Mainframe Gets Its Plug Pulled

From NASA’s CIO Linda Cureton:

“This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA’s last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe. For my millennial readers, I suppose that I should define what a mainframe is. Well, that’s easier said than done, but here goes — It’s a big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful. They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output – that is, writing or reading from data storage devices.

They’re really not so bad honestly, and they have their place. Things like virtual machines, hypervisors, thin clients, and swapping are all old hat to the mainframe generation though they are new to the current generation of cyber youths…But all things must change.”

Insert her sigh here..

Tags: cio, cloud, cloud computing, desktop virtualization, Federal, mainframe, NASA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 at 3:52 pm and is filed under security, Standards, 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.

Cloud Jobs 2012 – Winners and Losers

There’s a lot of talk in the media lately about Cloud Computing as a driver of employment in the US. [See this pieces by fox business below.] A word of warning about this analysis. While the writer here claims “11 cloud computing companies added 80,000 jobs in the U.S. in 2010, and the employment growth rate at these organizations was almost five times that of the high-tech sector overall,” the writer does not appear to allow for analysis of what jobs may be lost in the process. A major driver of cloud is the unburdening of infrastructure duties from local teams working behind the firewall. Those are jobs that may not be preserved as we go through this huge transition to shared public infrastructure for more and more important applications. They call it creative destruction of a reason. So watch where you step.

Cloud computing has the potential to become a greater generator of jobs in the U.S. than the Internet was in its early years, a new study says. In addition to creating very large business opportunities and hundreds of thousands of new jobs, cloud services could also save U.S. businesses billions of dollars. The driving forces are the proliferation of mobile devices, swelling social media usage and the emergence of “Big Data,” the study found.

The study, sponsored by enterprise software giant SAP, looked at the trends and indicators supporting the growth of cloud services and the ways cloud computing may create jobs. It found that 11 cloud computing companies added 80,000 jobs in the U.S. in 2010, and the employment growth rate at these organizations was almost five times that of the high-tech sector overall.

Companies selling those cloud services are projected to grow revenues by an average of $20 billion per year for the next five years, which has the potential to generate as many as 472,000 jobs in the U.S. and abroad in the next five years.

Tags: Big Data, cloud, cloud computing, jobs, virtualization

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 9:24 am and is filed under cloud, IT Job Market. 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.

Cyber Security Gets the DOD Cloud Treatment

eWeek.com did a nice piece, quoting extensively from recent NSA public statements, on how both cloud and data security strategies in general are starting to move into extended pilot modes. Here is a link to the General’s presentation - below is an except from the eWeek summary.

U.S. Counts on the Cloud to Boost Cyber–Security

By: Fahmida Y. Rashid, eWeek.com

Army Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency (NSA), discussed the cloud and how to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber-threats at a recent Information Systems Security Association conference in Baltimore and in a follow-up interview with eWEEK. As commander of U.S. Cyber Command, he also discussed rules of engagement for the military in cyberspace.

The cloud is a key part of the intelligence community’s IT strategy, Alexander said, because cloud computing gives defense and intelligence agencies more visibility over hackers who are trying to breach government networks.

Within the NSA and Department of Defense (DoD), there are more than 7 million pieces of IT infrastructure and systems and 15,000 different network enclaves, according to numbers provided by the general. With each enclave protected by its own firewall, network administrators have little to no insight into what is happening in isolated and segmented networks, he said.

“Collapsing the enclaves” would provide administrators with a better end-to-end view of their networks and situational awareness, said Alexander. He added that it’s not a perfect solution, but “it is more defensible.”

In a pilot program, the NSA has reduced the number of applications it is running from 5,000 to 250 cloud applications and slashed the number of help desks from 900 to 450, according to Alexander. The agency plans to keep shrinking the infrastructure to just two help desks and 20 data centers, as well as adopt more open-source software, he said, noting that the military is already using Apache Hadoop and OpenStack.

Read the full piece here.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, CTO, Cybersecurity, Federal, security, strategy

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2011 at 3:07 pm and is filed under 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:

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Gomez, Microsoft, monitor, rackspace

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.

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.

Tags: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, cloud, cloud computing, Federal, Michael Grollman, security

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.

Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Bursts Into the Cloud

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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 19th, 2011 at 11:19 am and is filed under Cool and from Redmond, databases, HPC, Hyper-V, 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.