cloud

Microsoft's big switch to server/client computing

Speaking at Structure 08, Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft, shed some light on the cloud-based infrastructure supporting Microsoft's online services.

Despite characterizations that Microsoft is stuck in the client/server world, the company is spending billions to apply the cloud, or server/client, model, where most of the computing happens in the cloud and some small amount on the client (offline support for applications). But until Microsoft Office and other applications are built for the cloud, the laggard characterization will continue to stick to the company's forehead.

Microsoft has one of the … Read more

Mosso revamps cloud service tools

Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, has added a new Web-based control panel and a behind-the-scenes provisioning system to its Hosting Cloud service.

The company said Wednesday the control panel makes it easier for users to set up and manage hosted applications. It includes a new Web-based file manager that gives users access to stored data so that they can create and decompress archives and change access permissions more easily.

A snapshot tool, within the control panel, lets users access and reinstate previous versions of files in the case of accidental overwrite, the company said.

The provisioning … Read more

Tiny (comparatively) GoGrid takes on Amazon Web Services

SAN FRANCISCO--Here at the Structure conference, everything is cloud, cloud, cloud. No one wants to own their own Web hardware anymore, it seems, and the company representatives speaking here are happy to provide the software and virtual services to replace the hardware.

One of those is GoGrid, which is shooting for the same cloud-computing market that Amazon.com is making a run at with its EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, service and related Web services.

The GoGrid pitch: We're cheaper. And easier.

GoGrid CEO John Keagy told me that, at volume, his services undercut Amazon's. He charges 8 … Read more

Is Google's BigTable too private?

SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:

Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer, Google Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent Tony Lucas, CEO, XCalibre Communications Lew Moorman, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, Rackspace Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, GigaSpaces Joe Weinman, VP of Strategic Solutions at AT&T

The panelists agreed that there will be open and proprietary, as well as specialized, cloud platforms. The discussion got a little heated between Google's Bisciglia and Joyent's Hoffman on the … Read more

Amazon's blueprint for cloud computing

In the early morning at Structure 08, AMR Research's Jonathan Yarmis described various tech trends around cloud computing. Mendel Rosenblum, a founder and technical lead behind VMware, outlined the role of virtualization in data centers.

Now Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO at Amazon.com, is talking about why Amazon is in the cloud computing business, how it got there, and why customers should want it. Instead of every company or developer doing the heavy lifting, dealing with the "muck" as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to say, Amazon opened up its software-as-a-service stack (Amazon Web Services) … Read more

The new geek chic: Data centers

Forget about flashy Web 2.0 applications. The real, geeky coolness of the Web is the growing acreage of data centers that deliver bits to billions of devices. At GigaOM's Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, infrastructure--"clouds" of servers, storage and networks--was the headliner.

Jonathan Yarmis, vice president of advanced, emerging and disruptive technologies at AMR Research, said changes in the next five years will make the past Internet revolution feel like child's play. He didn't explain exactly how the next five years will be more revolutionary than evolutionary, but outlined the … Read more

Trend Micro proposes better mousetrap: cloud-based

I've been using the tag line "information security is worse than you think" for several years. Every once in awhile, I meet with a security vendor who backs up my words with scary metrics. Last week in New York, Trend Micro filled this role.

According to Trend Micro's Chief Technology Officer Raimund Genes, the volume and potency of Web-based threats is now exceeding the industry's capacity to fight back. For example, Trend Micro says that it added approximately 50 new anti-malware patterns to its database each day in 2005. In 2008, the volume has grown … Read more

Hyperic service peers into Amazon cloud

Cloud computing is growing in popularity, thanks in large part to the availability of Web-based services that take some of the pain out of IT.

But when things break, it isn't always easy to know why: Is the problem in the application or in the cloud?

Hyperic, a San Francisco-based company specializing in Web management tools, has one answer. It's launching a new service, called CloudStatus, that reports on the health and performance of Amazon Web Services.

The free service, in beta testing now, works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, … Read more

Parascale nabs $11 million for Linux cloud storage

Parascale said Monday that it raised $11.37 million in Series A venture funding from Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, the latest in a string of cloud computing investments.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based Parascale, which provides storage in a networking "cloud" for digital content providers, said it plans to use the money to develop and market its upcoming Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS). PCS is an application that "aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud," according to the company.

Charles River partner Bruce Sachs and Menlo's John Jarve … Read more

Salesforce extends Google link with new toolkit

Salesforce.com is furthering its alliance with Google through a new toolkit that lets developers tap into Google's services.

The two companies inked an initial deal in April to link Salesforce's CRM (customer relationship management) applications with integrated Google Apps.

On Monday, Salesforce.com said it has launched the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs, which will let developers using its Force.com development platform connect to data in Google Apps.

Force.com is Salesforce.com's cloud computing service for building hosted Web applications.

The companies envision that the toolkit will pave the way for new … Read more