cloud

Why Dell has its head in the clouds

Dell plans to preload computers with more subscription-based functions. The idea: give IT another, presumably less expensive way to access a myriad of systems management functions through the "cloud."

The details are still being worked over but the idea would involve a range of high-end services delivered through the cloud, like remote infrastructure management, or the ability to monitor and proactively deal with malfunctioning assets on a computer network.

"We think that we've sorted through most of those issues. It will work in some customer segments and not in others," said Stephen Schuckenbrock, Dell's … Read more

Top five IT spending priorities for the recession

InfoWorld consulted a range analysts and CIOs to figure out the five technologies IT shops must continue to invest in despite the recession. The common theme, says IDC chief analyst and senior vice president Frank Gens, is that "any technologies that can save companies money or reduce expenses will continue to thrive."

1. Storage: Disks and management software 2. Business intelligence: Niche analytics 3. Virtualization: Optimizing resources 4. Security: Data and end points 5. Cloud computing: Business solutions

These are all very logical, but I fail to see why the Cloud factors so heavily (say in contrast to … Read more

Amazon launches content delivery network

In conjunction with its S3 storage offering and other Web Services products, ever-expanding Web giant Amazon has launched a beta version of a content delivery network called CloudFront.

The service, which promises "low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments," uses a global network of edge locations to keep the system humming.

Amazon announced in September its intentions to launch a CDN, with a target date of the end of 2008. It also made clear then that pricing would be consumption-based. Amazon has declared that there is "no minimum fee" for CloudFront; customers pay only … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 854: Death to the Moon

We thought about calling this podcast graves in space, or delicious Yak, or Jason makes the earth move. But soup_n_salad in the chat room nailed it. A new company wants to send 5,000 capsules full of cremated remains to the moon for burial. Natali and Jason think this is littering, essentially. I think they gotta go somewhere and the Moon has space. We also talk about the new Asus phone, Flash on Windows mobile, and more. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 854

Obama can’t use his BlackBerry http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/us/politics/16blackberry.html… Read more

Internal clouds make enterprises feel comfortable

No enterprise is going to put anything important in a public cloud for a very long time. If you run the IT infrastructure for any significant-scale enterprise your current reality tends to be a bit sobering if not downright depressing.

Your data centers are a mix of many different server flavors, operating systems, application platforms, and even virtualization technologies that no cloud provider can currently support without major expense and disruption.

To consider an internal cloud, CIOs are going to have to get over a few hurdles.

First, they need to know what they have in their data centers and … Read more

Gartner: Internal clouds are coming

Gartner analyst Tom Bittman is predicting "that the future of corporate IT is in private clouds, essentially flexible computing networks modeled after public providers such as Google and Amazon, yet built and managed internally for each business's users."

While it's true that most enterprises can't replicate the economies of scale that Google and Microsoft have, most companies do have spare computing capacity that can be used as part of an internal cloud.

I've written many times about the need for a virtualized layer--one that separates the platforms and the applications. Gartner agrees and … Read more

Package management and the Cloud

I've written in the past that the Cloud needs some akin to Linux package management in order for it to be more manageable and allow for easier deployment.

The guys at El Reg asked me to write up a piece for their Developer site. Here's a snippet:

For the cloud to become more like an operating system and less like an amorphous mass, and by definition more useful to business, some basic functions need to become part of the fabric.

By that, I mean seamless (and near invisible) integration with the underlying infrastructure components (operating system, virtual machine, … Read more

Microsoft's licensing cripples its relevance to the Amazon cloud

Could Microsoft's proprietary licensing end up hurting it in the cloud?

That's the question asked on the Cloud Avenue blog, and the answer seems to be a clear "yes." Whatever the benefit to Microsoft in a desktop and server world, proprietary licensing stands to hobble its attempts to be widely relevant in the cloud or, at least, in Amazon.com's EC2 cloud.

Why? Because Microsoft's proprietary licensing ensures it can't be a viable player in Amazon's newly announced Paid AMI (Amazon Machine Image) Support marketplace. The program allows users to "share … Read more

The license wars are over

If the license wars aren't over, they've certainly muted.

The adoption of the new version of the General Public License, used by Linux and many other open-source projects, was a long, loud, and contentious process. But after all the sturm und drang, it's not clear to me what real impact GPL 3 will have.

Depending on whom you ask, clauses concerning ideological sticking points such as digital rights management were either narrowed in scope or defanged almost completely. And it seems entirely possible that Linux, perhaps the best-known open-source project licensed under the GPL, may never move … Read more