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IBM making moves towards private cloud with Tivoli Updates

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

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2011 at 1:17 am and is filed under application virtualization, cloud, Linux, Open Source, security, virtualization, VMware. 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.

Survey: Developers to Focus on Hybrid Cloud in 2010

By: Darryl K. Taft, e-week

2010-01-13

According to a recent Evans Data survey, more than 60 percent of IT shops plan to adopt a hybrid cloud model over the coming year.

Results of the Evans Data Cloud Development Survey show that 61 percent of the more than 400 developers polled said that some portion of their organizations’ IT resources will move to the public cloud within the next year. However, over 87 percent of the developers said half or less than half of their resources will move to the public cloud. As a result, the hybrid cloud is set to dominate the coming IT landscape, Evans Data officials said.

“The hybrid Cloud presents a very reasonable model, which is easy to assimilate and provides a gateway to Cloud computing without the need to commit all resources or surrender all control and security to an outside vendor,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, in a statement. “Security and government compliance are primary obstacles to public cloud adoption, but a hybrid model allows for selective implementation so these barriers can be avoided.”

Evans Data conducted its survey over November and December of 2009 to examine various aspects of cloud development including: timelines for public and private cloud adoption, obstacles and perceived benefits of cloud development, collaborating and developing in the cloud, tools and architectures for cloud development, virtualization in the private data center and more, the company said.

Meanwhile, also according to the Evans Data survey, nearly two-thirds or 64 percent of the developers said they expect their cloud applications to extend to the mobile space.

Other highlights of the survey include that MySQL is the preferred database for use in the public cloud cited by more than 55 percent of the developers. And more than 28 percent of developers said they preferred VMware as their favored hypervisor vendor or user in a virtualized private cloud, followed by Microsoft and IBM.

Rackspace Cloud Business: A Closer Look

by MSPMentor

Rackspace is seeing growth in its cloud computing business at the same time the company’s traditional managed hosting operation acquires more of an up-market tone. But exactly how much has RackSpace’s cloud grown? And where is it going next? Here’s a look at the company’s strategy.

Rackspace executives shared some strategic updates Monday during a Q3 earnings call. Here are some of the main points:

Rackspace generated $15.3 million in cloud business in Q3, a 17.5 percent increase over Q2 and a 138 percent lift compared with last year’s Q3.
Cloud now accounts for 10 percent of Rackspace’s total net revenue, up from 5 percent in Q3 2008, according to Bruce Knooihuizen, the company’s chief financial officer.
Managed hosting revenue for the quarter came in at $147.1 million, up 5.8 percent from the second quarter and a 11.5 percent increase over last year’s Q3.

Lanham Napier, Rackspace’s CEO and president, said the company aims to move up market in the managed hosting space, solving more complex IT needs. The cloud business, meanwhile, targets simpler, more dynamic workloads, he explained. Napier said the company is migrating single-server managed hosting customers to its cloud.

The company’s customer count suggests this movement. Between June 30 and September 30, Rackspace’s manage hosting customers declined from 19,363 to 19,328, while cloud customers rose from 51,440 to 61,616.

Overall, Napier said he sees a big opportunity on the enterprise side. He said Rackspace launched as an SMB-oriented company. While the company still caters to that segment, enterprise customers represent a bit less than half of the company’s business, he said.

Rackspace’s enterprise push has placed the company on a track to compete against traditional outsourcers such as IBM and HP. But Napier said Rackspace enjoys a business model advantage over those firms.

“We are cheaper and faster than they are,” he said, adding that Rackspace offers a degree of flexibility that traditional outsourcers can’t provide.

Rackspace’s enterprise rivals have a considerable size advantage. IBM had $103.6 billion in revenue last year, while HP’s sales are also north of the $100 billion mark. Rackspace had revenue of $531.9 million in 2008.

But market transitions have a way of favoring the smaller competitor — at least in the initial stages. Companies such as Lante Corp. and Sapient Corp. possessed an early edge in the client/server transition of the early 1990s, focusing on that technology from the outset. The larger integrators, invested in the mainframe world, had to learn a new business. Lante enjoyed a decent run through the 1990s, but was a 2002 casualty of the dot-com debacle. Sapient, meanwhile, has soldiered on as a business and IT consultancy.

In the cloud computing transition, the inevitable shakeout has yet to materialize. Hosting providers such as Rackspace, Savvis and Terremark will all have a go at cloud survival.

Proper Perspective

In RackSpace’s case, cloud revenue looks promising but it’s only 10 percent of total revenue, up from 5 percent at this time last year. Napier credits Amazon Web Services for pioneering cloud computing, but Rackspace Cloud will be gunning for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud spot at the top of the heap going forward.

Lanham also said that while Rackspace “is not a custom shop,” Rackspace’s competitive edge is their trademarked “fanatical support,” which helps match enterprise customers with the existing cloud solution that’s best for them.

“The cloud is for everyone, but not for everything,” Lanham said.

Also in the third quarter, Rackspace launched NoMoreServers.com, an online community meant to assist in moving hosted services to the cloud. Basically, Lanham says, SMBs should never need to buy another in-house server as long as Rackspace is willing to provide managed hosting.

Zend Teams With Microsoft, IBM, Gogrid, Rackspace, and others on Open Source Cloud Project

Wouldn’t it be great if all these guys really did open source cloud control api at this early stage in the evolution of the technology?

“Zend Technologies, in association with IBM, Microsoft and others, has launched the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project, an open-source initiative that enables developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers.

Zend Technologies, in association with IBM, Microsoft and others, has launched the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project, a new open-source initiative that enables developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers.

Zend officials said the Simple Cloud API project aims to facilitate the development of cloud applications that can access services on all major cloud platforms. Zend, IBM, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Rackspace and GoGrid are co-founding contributors to this community project. However, cloud giants such as Amazon and Google are not.

The Simple Cloud API project empowers developers to use one interface to interact with a variety of cloud application services, enabling them to more easily access new technologies from cloud vendors, said Dirk Nicol, director of emerging technology in IBM’s Software Group.

“Today developers have to write to a proprietary API, but with this Simple API you’ll have a common API that would work across vendors,” Nicol said. “It’s about portability and avoiding vendor lock-in. And this supports both public and private clouds.”

Check out more here.

Tags: cloud, Grollman, Hyper-V 2.0, IBM, Michael Grollman, Microsoft, outsource, rackspace, security, SOA, virtualization, Xen

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 10:44 pm and is filed under cloud, Cost Cutting, Disaster Recovery, Hyper-V, Linux, privacy, security, virtualization, 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.