cloud

Dell's designs on cloud computing

SAN FRANCISCO--Standing 52 stories in the air at the upscale Carnelian Room in the Bank of America building here, executives from Dell, Facebook, and Salesforce.com discussed the meaning and use of the latest technology buzzword, cloud computing.

The sky was blue and cloudless, but it didn't adversely impact the atmosphere of what turned out to be a Dell marketing event. It was pitched as an announcement about a partnership that involves "the next generation of cloud computing."

You might recall that Dell is the company that owns the URL Cloudcomputing.com, and made a failed attempt … Read more

Another large-scale Cloud data loss in process?

My post on using the Cloud for storage went live just minutes before my intrepid IT guy Kevin received this email from utility computing provider Flexiscale about the potential large-scale loss of data stored on their Cloud storage service.

The short version: human error in their backup process deleted one of the main storage volumes. Roughly 12 hours later users have read-only access to the storage platform but no read-write. And now, they have to rebuild, but don't have the space.

"After consulting with our storage vendor it was agreed the most sensible option would be to copy the entire volume to a new disk structure (still maintaining it's integrity and structure), from where we could re-mount it correctly. Unfortunately due to it's size we didn't have spare capacity on the platform to create a complete duplicate of it."

Without disparaging Flexiscale, this is what I mean about the BigCos like IBM figuring these "enterprise-class" features out before enterprises move into Cloud consumption.

Full email pasted below:… Read more

Opportunity for disaster recovery in the cloud

The vast scale of services like Amazon S3 or Google Apps provide new ways to establish or augment backup and disaster recovery plans.

Realistically, many large corporations won't trust their data to Google or Amazon.com (and they probably shouldn't). However, they will trust IBM, AT&T, and other big companies, as they start to expand their offerings.

If you are using AT&T bandwidth, and you can tap into its data centers for data recovery, you've just solved a major problem in a theoretically secure manner.

Managed backup and data recovery services do exist … Read more

Polluting the cloud with incompatible ideas and applications

Cloud computing means different things to different people. In this guest post, Tom Mornini, CTO, of Engine Yard looks at the differences amongst the applications that get lumped together as one amorphous cloudy mass.

Navigating the cloud Guest post by Tom Mornini, CTO, Engine Yard

The term cloud computing is now in common use. So common in fact, that it clearly encompasses many incompatible ideas. Let's consider the differences among Amazon's AWS, Google's AppEngine, and Apple's MobileMe.

AWS provides "raw" compute resources via EC2 and higher level services such as S3, SQS, and SimpleDB. … Read more

Latency (still) matters

Over five years ago, I wrote a research note titled "Latency Matters!" The impetus was the following observation:

What's the best way to estimate travel time? Would you rely on an estimate based solely on the number of lanes in the road and the sound of the engine? Nope. You need to know, at minimum, how far you have to travel, the condition of the road, and how fast you'll likely be able to go. Obvious, right?

You'd think so. But system and networking specs rate computer performance according to bandwidth and clock speed, the … Read more

Making the cloud more consumable for enterprises

With few reference points for enterprise cloud computing consumption, many new and interesting companies are popping up to make cloud resources available, with the aim of simplifying the processes.

3Tera's CEO Barry X. Lynn wrote a guest post on ZDNet that got me wondering about how software companies can leverage tools that make the cloud more consumable for users and, specifically, enterprises. Lynn takes the view that operations will be abstracted completely from data in the future, which affects both enterprises and the software that they run their businesses on.

While enterprises are growing comfortable with applications in clouds … Read more

Amazon launches hard disk in the sky

Amazon on Thursday announced that it is releasing its persistent storage option, called Elastic Block Service (EBS), to its suite of Amazon Web Services cloud computing options. The company announced this direction in April.

Previously, data associated with jobs running on Amazon's cloud computing platform, EC2, were attached to the jobs themselves; developers did not have access to their files and information except through EC2. With EBS, developers can create cloud-based file systems that they can access from whatever applications they wish. Amazon's other cloud storage systems, S3 and SimpleDB, don't offer this low-level access.

Based on … Read more

Build your own Cloud with the Eucalyptus open source project

Following up on some previous thoughts on how open source will underlay the Cloud, I spoke today with Rich Wolski, Associate Professor at UCSB who is Project Director for the Eucalyptus open source Cloud computing project.

Eucalyptus started out in the research labs at UCSB about a year ago but the coding. It's part of an NSF funded project called V-Grads. The goal of V-Grads is to create a software infrastrucure that gives Grid and grid-like programs a uniform execution target regardless of how the resources are managed.

Every year the Eucalyptus team demos how the applications are managed … Read more

A bill of rights for cloud computing

Cloud computing promises to liberate its adherents from the bother of messy implementations of software, while also freeing them from the constraints of hardware capacity. At the same time, however, cloud computing has the potential to deliver the ultimate in vendor lock-in.

My colleague, James Urquhart, has put together a proposed "cloud computing bill of rights" to help guide would-be cloud customers to those clouds best able to guarantee their freedom. Just as some are now clamoring for open-data commitments, James' suggestions are intended to deliver the value of the cloud without the lock-in:

No vendor shall, in … Read more