Posts Tagged ‘SOA’

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: , , , , , , ,

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.

At Oracle Open World, Oracle Commits To Cloud Computing

For those who still don’t think cloud is for real, another data point — this from the master skeptic himself, Ellison.

————-

InformationWeek

Global CIO: At Oracle Open World, Oracle Commits To Cloud Computing

By Bob Evans, InformationWeek

Sept. 19, 2010

If the lineup of keynote speakers and their topics for Oracle Open World tells us anything about Oracle’s forthcoming strategies, then it looks like Larry Ellison’s company is going announce a huge new commitment to cloud computing while shifting its plan for discussing its long-delayed Fusion applications.

I base that possibility on the fact that Oracle executive vice president Thomas Kurian’s keynote was originally scheduled to showcase Fusion apps, but will now be all about “Oracle and Cloud Computing” and his company’s role in the cloud “throughout the application lifecycle—from development and deployment to management and self-service administration. . . . Oracle’s cloud solution spans all layers of the cloud, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and applications or software as a service (SaaS), and this keynote focuses on how Oracle products enable cloud computing.”

In turn, none of the descriptions of keynotes to be given by Oracle executives during the massive 5-day event even mentions Fusion apps.

Of course, as is sometimes the case with Oracle, things may not be exactly as they seem. So while there’s no question that Kurian’s keynote indicates Oracle’s increased focus on and commitment to cloud computing, that refocus of Kurian’s talk away from Fusion and to the cloud does not necessarily mean Fusion apps will be invisible at the event.

That’s because the description for Larry Ellison’s keynote says only this: “Oracle Innovations: Join Larry Ellison as he previews the week’s announcements and key product innovations.” So I think we should look for Ellison to make a number of detailed disclosures about Fusion apps including release dates, pricing, and performance.

It’s also an absolute certainty that Ellison will include in his remarks about Fusion apps some pointed digs at SAP.

Earlier this year, when declaring that Oracle would overtake SAP in enterprise applications and IBM in high-end systems, Ellison skewered SAP’s underlying applications architecture, saying it was based on outdated and inflexible technology that would not be able to withstand the demands of real-time businesses.

Six months ago, in a quarterly earnings call with analysts, Ellison described the advantage he sees Oracle having over SAP: “In applications, SAP is the leader. But their technology that they use for applications is a proprietary technology—a German programming language called ABAP. That’s a 25-year-old technology that’s still the center of their architecture and strategy for applications going forward, this ABAP,” Ellison said.

“The center of our strategy going forward is Java and a modern service-oriented architecture. And during this calendar year we will deliver our Fusion applications—we’re been working on them for a while and we have rewritten, or written, in Java all of our accounting software, all of our supply chain software, all of our HR software, our sales automation, our service-automation software—has all been rewritten in Java with a modern service-oriented architecture. And we’re gonna go compete with SAP’s 25-year-old technology.”

Ellison then described how Oracle’s portfolio of applications with industry-specific functionality—some built internally, many acquired and integrated—allows Oracle to tap into new revenue streams unavailable to SAP.

“We think SAP is vulnerable and we can take them on in a variety of industries. The other thing that we’re doing is SAP is not doing is emphasizing industry functionalities. So it’s not just technology where we’re competing with SAP—we’re also competing with them on functionality,” Ellison said. (End of excerpt.)

So my take on the flip in Kurian’s keynote topic is that Oracle has chosen to leverage the huge momentum it has in the market following its blowout first-quarter results by explicitly adding cloud computing to the list of its top priorities: Fusion apps; the Exadata Database Machine and related new-product launches that will debut this week (possibly this evening in Ellison’s first keynote); Oracle’s stance on open-source technologies within its stable, primarily Java and MySQL; and its ongoing surge into not just the world of systems but also storage.

I’m glad to see the cloud move become official via Kurian’s keynote. In a Global CIO column I wrote late last week as a preview to this week’s event, called Global CIO: Larry Ellison’s Top 10 Priorities At Oracle Open World, I predicted that Oracle would this week announce the formation of a formal cloud-computing business unit within the company.

Read more here.

Tags: , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, September 20th, 2010 at 8:22 am and is filed under cloud, databases, FOSS and friends. 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.

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: , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Evaluating Cloud Services: Five Tips

Forrester’s Paul Roehrig has some advice for IT leaders investigating cloud service providers. Here’s his take on how to get started on separating the marketing noise from the must-haves.  Here’s his short list:

1. Differentiate between enabling and delivering cloud services.

2. Vendors should demonstrate latent capacity.

3. Ask to see a commercial client base.

4. Evaluate partnership ecosystems – and pay attention to Microsoft.

5. Don’t believe that cloud services are a “magic bullet.”

Check more out here.

Tags: , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under cloud, privacy, 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.

The Key to the Marriage of Cloud & SOA – Virtualization

Bringing Cloud Computing to SOA

It’s all about the services

By Dustin Amrhein

June 2, 2009 07:00 PM EDT

There’s no shortage of opinions on how cloud computing and SOA are related. Just plug the phrase into your favorite search engine and you’ll have a day’s worth of reading. What you are likely to find are articles discussing how SOA led to cloud computing, how a good SOA is a prerequisite to leverage cloud computing, or how to leverage cloud computing in your SOA. I’ve spent quite a bit of time reading these types of articles and listening to experts talk about SOA and cloud computing, and that got me to thinking. How can companies bring the cloud experience to their SOA?

In order to do this, a company may set out by creating clouds of their physical infrastructure, storage, or networking capabilities, which are all worthy pursuits. However, I believe the best way to cloud-enable a SOA is to deal with the heart of the SOA, the services. In short, to bring the cloud to SOA the goal should be to create a cloud of services. This is of course easier said than done, but as a general outline it would be a two step process:

  1. Virtualize the services
  2. Manage the virtualization

When we look at cloud computing in very plain terms, solutions usually constitute a set of virtualized resources and capabilities that allow those resources to be managed. Virtualizing the services in a SOA is a logical first step then toward moving to a cloud-enabled SOA. There are solutions in the marketplace today, the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance being one, which provide users a virtual packaging that includes an operating system, service infrastructure, and service. In effect, the service becomes a virtualized resource, thus enabling the next very important step in bringing the cloud to a SOA.

Virtualization alone does not a cloud make, so after users successfully virtualize the services in their SOA, capabilities to manage such virtualization need to be put in place. The capabilities I’m speaking of here bring cloud-like characteristics to the service virtualization. These include the ability to create, deploy, dynamically allocate, and track usage of these virtualized services. This results in an elastic cloud and one in which usage across the cloud can be tracked to facilitate the utility pricing model so often associated with clouds.

Read more here.

Tags:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 12:16 pm and is filed under cloud, 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.