Advanced Cloud » Cloud Computing

Do you find cloud email confusing?

Yousef — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:01:05 +0000

Guest blog by Andrew Gradwell

Further to my very simplistic view of the cloud in my previous post I thought it would be worth elaborating on what the concept of ‘the cloud’ would mean to small (non IT) business. I went to the world cloud forum in Kensington Olympia this week and also took part in ‘Cloud Camp’. The introductory speech was from Simon Wardley and it was excellent – something that anyone who doesn’t really know about the cloud should try and catch. There are versions of his introduction on youtube and I would suggest it is worth checking out if you want a good basic idea of what ‘the cloud’ is.

The only negative was that one of his first definitions included the word ‘paradigm’ which I signalled in my previous blog as off putting language for the man on the street (in my defence I did say it was better than most definitions). Simon basically drew an IT parallel between Cloud Computing and the industrial revolution and made reference to the fact that the concept of cloud computing was first talked about by John McCarthy (American Computer Scientist) in 1968 as ‘Utility Computing’. This is basically the concept I spoke about in my last post but the important thing that it adds is the fact that, just like the industrial revolution, it cannot be prevented, it is here. The reason for this is that the technical advantage that certain IT systems grant companies, has reduced. Company choice is now either moving their systems to the cloud or paying over the odds for (at least) their basic systems – thus creating an operational disadvantage as companies would be losing money through maintaining in-house email and document management.

One of the most interesting things that became very obvious in the speeches that followed is how long many multinationals have been using the likes of Google Apps as the base for their IT infrastructure. Workers in these companies make great use of the live editing features in Google Docs although they still seem to run Microsoft Office for desktop work. This is very interesting as it seems to me that Google got a massive drop on Microsoft by providing the cloud suite a long time before Microsoft, who have now responded with Exchange Online and BPOS. However, these companies are running Google on Microsoft Windows and using Microsoft Office as their main set of office applications (and probably trawling the net in Internet Explorer, where their main search engine is Google). As things heat up, both providers seem to be making moves to compete on the home ground of the other as Google is planning on releasing an Operating System whilst Microsoft hammers us with a massive marketing campaign for their Bing search engine.

The important thing for small businesses and non-IT folk to get their head around however is branding and the ways companies brand their cloud offerings. They position themselves very differently and maintain an aura of mystery around their products. Any of your important questions are nearly impossible to get answers to as products all pretend to be something completely different focussing on their positives and ignoring any areas where they may fall short. BPOS and Google Apps Premier are comparative products – as is ZOHO Business which is coming to Cloud Hypermarket in the next couple of days. They all provide email with large mailboxes as well as their own collaboration systems and are excellent starting points for your first foray into the cloud. You can find a lot of information from the cloud comparison search result page on the Cloud Hypermarket site, videos are immediately available and through the ‘more info’ button you will find a lot of product information.

The background of these companies gives us some clues to how the companies have arrived at their products. Google has always been web based so its move into the cloud wasn’t a move, it was just where it was. They have spent a lot of time providing free software for consumers. They have added to it and bundled it into their premier suite to sell to business. The main worry here is that nothing is truly free – there is always a reason that people give you free things and Google is not a charity. On the positive side, Google approaches each user as having an equal value, it doesn’t discriminate between the owner of a multinational and the office junior of a small office setup.

Microsoft are the true giant of the computer industry. They have been around for a long time – it would be hard to envisage a world where most average users pc’s didn’t run Microsoft windows and use Microsoft office. Things are changing quickly and unlike Google, Microsoft have had to respond to get into the cloud and steering a company of that size into a whole new direction is a big operation. But they are ‘All In’ and they have the familiar work interface. Almost all companies run MS Outlook and MS Office. A huge amount of office workers are familiar with Exchange Online, and sales of SharePoint have done nothing but increase. Microsoft understand and are the market leaders in the business market.

Zoho have started from scratch, in the cloud market and aimed at business. This means that on one hand they have the business positioning of Microsoft and the cloud base of Google and whilst this would appear to put them in a better position that the other two, they are not as well established. Zoho have done extremely well considering when they started out they were David against Goliath and his bigger mate. A stone to the head of one giant would just leave them exposed to be crushed by the other – Zoho’s best bet is to be stealthy and hope the two Giants are fighting each other so hard that they don’t notice as they emerge as a serious contender.

Cleared anything up? Maybe a little? Use the compare email and document management search on Cloud Hypermarket and I hope it all makes a little more sense, or get in touch and we’ll help you find the best fit for your company. Or please feel free to contact us and we’ll help you find the best product for your company.

Demystify your migration to cloud

Yousef — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:44:22 +0000

I originally wrote this article for focus.com

New cloud technology is here. Microsoft is ‘all in,’ Google always has been and what remains of IBM is plowed into cloud services through LotusLive. Independents like Cobweb and Rackspace (who provide 1.7 million business users with cloud email and storage) have been making large amounts out of this for a while. The cloud means massive savings for all businesses on hardware and software. Some of the biggest companies are taking these savings and putting them into more (expensive) technology such as iPads for employees so they are always on the same hub. Companies like Outsourcery provide these solutions for big business, and the solutions come at a premium. Large details of this nature make a lot of money for providers like Outsourcery.

Unfortunately, this means smaller businesses (not necessarily financially but based on number of employees) are left behind as such companies believe there is not enough profit in providing them with cloud systems. The existing support companies for smaller businesses are adverse to the idea of providing cloud services because they will decrease their profit margins in the way they are currently set up. In part this is due to the price war going on between Microsoft and Google; prices for base packages are very low. IT companies providing for small business make a lot of money out of selling software and hardware. They currently have to overcompensate and sell companies more than they need, so if and when such companies grow, the IT structure can cope with it. They also make a lot of money out of maintenance when these systems fail.

Cloud systems basically remove these factors and thus a large amount of charges small business providers can justify. The cloud systems are based on massive, backed up infrastructure, meaning if there are any errors then systems are automatically rerouted and email, shared drive storage and collaboration tools will not go down. Microsoft and Google guarantee a 99.9 percent uptime which equates to eight hours and 46 minutes a year downtime (24/7), and any business will tell you that this is a vast improvement on in-house systems. Also, if your system were to go down in the middle of the night or on a weekend, it will be fixed before you even find out, rather than discovering the problem when you are due to start work and then having to wait for it to be fixed. Security en masse is better too. If someone wants to hack your in-house system they will find it a lot easier to do than hacking Microsoft, then finding your system within the cloud (a needle in a haystack), then hacking that.

All other independent providers (such as Cobweb, Rackspace and 1&1) are providing their own systems based on Google or Microsoft offerings. With no clear definitions yet in place, it is a minefield for anybody who is not an expert to know which service provides what, with endless technical jargon specific to each provider.

Cloud Hypermarket has grouped such technical jargon into specific fields so companies can compare and contrast the features offered by each one. You can buy direct services with Google and Microsoft or go to an independent vendor — they provide a gateway to any of these services. They offer telephone advice as they may still have questions regarding each service. One of their important selling points is that they are completely impartial — comparing Microsoft and Google services, as well as services of independent resellers such as Cobweb, Rackspace and 1&1.

The biggest stumbling block so far has been the amount of confusion surrounding the ‘Internet cloud.’ Most people have heard of it but are not sure exactly what it is and why it is to their advantage to use it. During recent user testing, several testers stated that they were IT savvy and knew about the cloud — but they came up with some extremely variable definitions. Reports from certain providers and reports suggest that around 60 percent of small businesses have not heard of the cloud, or have no idea what it is.

Put simply, cloud computing will save companies money, provide unlimited scalability, provide better security and better availability. If your in house server or email goes down, then there’s nothing you can do about it until it is fixed. If your Internet connection goes down, then you cannot send email from your in house system as it has no way of communicating. With a cloud system, you can still access your email, share drives and send email by using another connection via 3G, mobile phone or local wireless connections. It is no longer a question of ‘Will all companies move their systems to the cloud?’ It is a question of how long it will take them to do it.

IBM lessons learned on the cloud

Yousef — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:32:16 +0000

Learn about the valuable lessons IBM has learned as we have worked with customers over the past nine months on cloud computing initiatives. These insights are designed to help you understand some of the challenges and help you outline the criteria/service levels you should be asking your cloud service provider about.

Top 250 Players of the Cloud Computing industry

Yousef — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:29:40 +0000

3Leaf Systems – Describes itself as a provider of “next-generation server solutions to enable cloud computing.” Specifically, 3Leaf offers to help companies “achieve a terabyte of DRAM at dramatically low cost” based on low-cost commodity servers by providing virtualization of CPU and memory for an entire server farm. 3PAR- Recently announced its “Cloud-Agile” program, a new partnership initiative “to promote the adoption of cloud computing and cloud-based services offered by leading providers with infrastructures powered by 3PAR Utility Storage.”

3Tera – Offering what it calls “Cloud Computing Without Compromise,” 3Tera enables the provision and deployment of “scalable clustered applications in minutes from anywhere in the world.” The company was recently acquired by CA.

10Gen – Co-founded by Dwight Merriman, who also co-founded DoubleClick and served as its CTO for ten years, 10gen is a commercial entity offering “innovative platform technology” around the Mongo database – an open source document-oriented database “which makes data storage for web (and other) applications fast and easy.”

Abiquo – Newly re-launched with the help of $5.1M in VC money, Abiquo is now headquartered in Redwood City, CA, and has a new CEO, Pete Malcolm. the company’s flagship Cloud management product, Abiquo 1.5, is “the first product to allow IT managers to automatically convert virtual machine images built for one hypervisor technology to any other supported hypervisor.” One example: Abiquo 1.5 can convert from VMware to Microsoft Hyper-V, through a single drag-and-drop operation.

Adaptive Computing – Manager of some of the world’s largest computing installations, privately held Adaptive Computing has an offering, the Moab suite, that “delivers infrastructure intelligence that enables data center and private and public cloud environments to adapt to changing business needs in real time.” Moab, which Adaptive defines as “unified intelligent automation technology,” seeks to empower organizations “to move beyond consolidated hardware and software infrastructures to the real promise of private clouds” – a promise which it defines as “the automated and intelligent delivery of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) based on application workloads.”

Adaptivity – Adaptivity “provides integrated solutions that automate IT Delivery optimization across enterprise computing environments.” Those behind the company built the largest private cloud while at Wachovia and are today building clouds with Unisys. Adaptivity sees the Cloud Computing opportunity from a much broader perspective. “IaaS type resources managed externally from the enterprise do provide value; however, the larger opportunity is enabling enterprises to change how they deliver and consume IT resources,” says CEO Tony Bishop in a Q&A with Cloud Computing Journal.

Agathon Group – A dedicated grid environment that allows charitable and non-profit campaigns to scale on demand.

Akamai – Akamai claims to have been optimizing the cloud for over ten years, building a global computing platform “that helps make cloud computing a reality.” Services for cloud optimization are now a vital part of the company’s total offering, and go well beyond Content Delivery Network (CDN) cache-based technologies – marking Akamai’s transition from CDN to full-fledged Cloud Computing player.

Amazon EC2 - When Amazon introduced its virtual computing environment, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2, “to enable you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days,” it single-handedly brought Cloud Computing to the very forefront of public awareness by using Web services to provide what it called “resizeable compute capacity in the cloud.” EC2 runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters and allows customers to pay only for what they use. See also S3.

Amplidata – The Amplidata offering – a “fully online and ultimately scalable storage system” – is an answer to industry trends like the growing need for disk based storage, the success of SSD, RAID not keeping up with availability and efficiency requirements. Termed “unbreakable storage” by the company, it has plenty of features for cloud-like deployments: scalability, thin provisioning, snapshots and cloning.

Apache Hadoop -

AppCloud – see EngineYard

Appirio – Offers services and products to accelerate the adoption of on-demand solutions, and recently secured $5.6 million of financing in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital.

Appistry - As a company that positions itself boldly “At the convergence of Grid Computing, Virtualization and SOA” Appistry offers a grid-based application platform that makes it very easy to scale-out CPU- and data-intensive applications across a virtualized grid of commodity servers. Unlike traditional grid products based on legacy scheduler technology, the company’s robust “fabric” architecture has no single point of failure and “is well suited for extreme transaction processing (XTP), software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, and other data- and CPU-intensive applications.”

AppNexus

Apprenda – The true power of software-based computing was realized when software developers could stop focusing on interfacing directly with hardware, and instead focus on the ingenuity of their software, say the founders of Apprenda – the company behind SaaSGrid, an operating system for building and deploying Software as a Service applications, and a platform for conducting Software as a Service business.

AppZero – Pioneer of virtual application appliances (VAA) which decouple an application from the operating system (OS) and its underlying infrastructure.” The resultant virtual application appliance contains an application with its dependencies, but with zero operating system (zeOS) component,” says the company. The aim of VAAs is to enable enterprises to provision server based applications to any machine in the data center in a matter of seconds or move an application from the data center to the cloud (D2C).

Aptana – Aptana has recently beta-released Aptana Cloud, which it says “is architected to complement Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google, Joyent and others.” Targeted at rapid development, in particular web applications that need to scale rapidly (think Facebook applications etc.), Aptana cloud plugs into the Aptana IDE.

Arjuna – Describing its Agility offering as an “on-ramp to the Cloud [that] allows the IT department to begin to experiment with cloud computing in a gradual, incremental way, without any need for disruption to existing service,” Arjuna is positioned to help IT towards a world in which internal IT infrastructure can over time be increasingly subsumed into the cloud.

Asankya – Asankya describes itsefl as “the cloud acceleration company” and specializes in the high speed delivery of Internet-based applications. Asankya provides an Application Delivery Network (ADN) service for leading SaaS companies, cloud storage providers, internal enterprise cloud users and key government entities.

AT&T – AT&T broke into the cloud business in August 2008 with the global launch of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting – described as “a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses.”

Azure – see Microsoft

BlueLock – Claiming to have “some of the best virtualization and cloud talent around,” BlueLock – a provider of cloud hosting and managed IT services – notes that it has helped companies of all sizes find the best way to leverage industry-leading cloud hosting solutions. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, a Fortune 500 company or a start-up,” says the Company on its website.

Bluewolf – A leading provider of on-demand software deployment services, Bluewolf offers remote database management and recently announced its “Arcade” cloud storage offering that allows users to economically store a virtually unlimited number of files of all sizes through the Salesforce interface.

Boomi – Creator of AtomSphere, which the company calls “the industry’s first integration platform-as-a-service.” It is a pure SaaS integration platform that does not require software or appliances.

Box-Net

Booz Allen Hamilton – Management consultancies are also now part of the Cloud ecosystem by dint of their wide range of offerings aimed at all aspects of the phenomenon, and Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) in particular has positioned itself in the forefront the federal government’s Cloud Computing initiative. According to its special Cloud Computing website. “Booz Allen is prepared to support all elements of government defense and civilian missions and migration efforts to “the cloud.” … Booz Allen is also developing new economic analysis—addressing all cost categories for a variety of potential cloud uses—to help agencies “make the case” for migrating to the cloud.”

CA Technologies – Bought the key assets – software assets and engineering team – of Cloud Computing player Cassatt in June 2009. Followed by 3Tera in February 2010. There’s a great blog here that gives an insight into what’s cooking, written by CA Technologies though leaders – or “Storm Chasers” as they’re apparently referred to internally. And the roadmap for the overall CA Technologies approach to Cloud computing is here.

Callidus On-Demand SPM - see Callidus Software

Callidus Software – This leading provider of Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions has launched Callidus On-Demand SPM, “a scalable, secure, subscriber-based model that does not require additional IT resources.”

Canonical – One of the main sponsors and supporters of Ubuntu – the first Linux distribution to launch a hybrid cloud strategy offering its users integrated open source technology to easily build private clouds combined with a lean operating system designed for use on Amazon’s EC2.

Cassatt – [UPDATE: Cassatt is no more. Its key assets were sold to CA in June 2009.] As early as 2004 Cassatt, led by visionary CEO Bill Coleman (the ‘B’ in BEA Systems), was outlining a roadmap to deliver on the promise of automating IT operations for on-demand computing. Its angle, Cloud Computing-wise: a focus not on public or external clouds but on ‘Internal Clouds’ since external cloud computing but may be ruled out due to lack of SLA control, security, and compliance, whereas Cassatt contends there is an alternative: an internal Utility Computing architecture yielding the same simplicity and economies-of-scale as an external PaaS cloud.

Cisco - By virtue of its recent acquisitions, most significantly WebEx and PostPath, Cisco is firmly on its way to joining the Cloud Crowd. “We are believers in the cloud-based delivery model for certain types of services in particular inter-company collaboration services, and that is why we got WebEx and now PostPath,” Charles Carmel, Cisco’s vice president of corporate development, told Red Herring in August 2008.

Citrix – Citrix Cloud Center (C3), aimed at Service Providers, is “an integrated portfolio of Citrix delivery infrastructure products packaged and marketed to the cloud service provider market.”

Cloud9 Analytics – Offers what is calls “the industry’s first truly on-demand analytics platform” – the brainchild of CTO Scott Weiner, who views the Cloud as the ultimate data warehouse in the sky.

Cloudant – A Y-Combinator company whose founders have more than 10 years of experience managing multi-petabyte datasets, Cloudant’s first product is a CouchDB-as-a-Service (CDBaaS?), or what the company calls “Hosted Couch.”

CloudBerry Lab – Established in 2008 by a group of experienced IT professionals with the mission “to help organizations in adopting Cloud computing technologies by closing the gap between Cloud vendors propositions and consumer needs through development of innovative low-cost solutions” – flagship product: CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3.

Cloudera – Recently co-founded by former Googler Christophe Bisciglia and others, Cloudera help its customers install, configure and run Hadoop for large-scale data processing and analysis.

Cloud Leverage – Launched Feb. 2010, Cloud Leverage is a cloud storage, acceleration, and security platform.

Cloudscale – Cloudscale’s unique patent-pending cloud dataflow technology “automatically provides the parallelism and scalability required to handle anything from one-off personal analytics agents up to the most demanding live analytics applications required by the world’s leading organizations in business, web, science and government.”

CloudSmart - see CSS Corp

CloudShare – Using sophisticated virtualization technology to simulate an entire IT environment, CloudShare “enables technology vendors and enterprises to conduct evaluations, proofs-of-concept, demos, training and certification without shipping machines or traveling to customers, using an on-demand cloud-based service.”

Cloudswitch – Fast-growing cloud computing company backed by Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture and Commonwealth Capital Ventures, currently in stealth mode. CloudSwitch is developing what it describes as “an innovative software appliance that delivers the power of cloud computing seamlessly and securely so enterprises can dramatically reduce cost and improve responsiveness to the business.”

Cloudworks – The goal of Cloudworks is to allow small and mid-market companies to outsource all of their computers, software, and data. Completely web-based, it works like Salesforce or Hotmail – a company’s employees can log in through a web browser to access their desktop, server, software, files, email…everything.

Coghead – [Closed its doors February 2009.]

CohesiveFT – As the provider of what it calls ‘Elastic Server On-Demand’ – aimed at “enabling customers to build and manage applications for virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing,” CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server Platform allows users to assemble and deploy servers to Cloud Computing Platforms “in minutes.” The company likes to think of Elastic Server as a Great Enabler, “allowing you to package your apps for prime time, and do it all by yourself.”

Cordys – The Process Factory by Cordys is a simple, reliable and secure solution for anyone to create MashApps business processes from the Cloud – simply by mixing and matching standard business applications such as Google apps and commercially available services. MashApps can be made in minutes, without any coding. This tool has the capability to do for cloud application development environments what Visual Basic did for Windows – fast, easy, and efficient to develop and deploy bespoke applications.

CSS Corp – Through CSS Labs, CSS Corp – headquartered in San Jose, CA – develops cloud computing solutions “that help its customers meet real-world business challenges.” In November 2009 it launched Go Cloud, an entire suite of platforms and services based on cloud computing. In April 2010 this was expanded into a CSS suite of Cloud management tools including CSS CloudSmart (an ANT-based automated deployment tool to automate complex enterprise application deployment process on the cloud.) In June 2010 it acquire Aliquo Solutions “to help [its] customers manage their technical debt as well as explore new technologies such as cloud computing.”

Cumulux – Cumulux is a Cloud solution provider offering products and services that “help enterprises harness the benefits of the cloud.” Cumulux’ flagship product, Hybrid Axis “helps enterprises extend their current investments to the cloud by integrating traditional and cloud based applications.” Cumulux also offers services like cloud assessments, “rapid prototyping to help enterprises take the right steps towards cloud adoption.”

Dataline – Provides cloud computing advice and expertise to the larger FSIs (i.e. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, etc) and bundles commercial cloud computing offerings in a way that meets Federal customer requirements. Although not a product vendor, the role this company fills as a mid-level Federal System Integrator is crucial to the adoption of these technologies by the public sector.

Dell

Desktoptwo – This “Cloud desktop” offering from Sun Global Partner Sapotek describes itself as “your home in the cloud” and already claims to have users in 120 countries and a vibrant community.

ElasticHosts

Elastic Compute Cloud – see Amazon EC2

Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) – see Enomaly

Elastra – Styling itself as a provider of “Elastic Computing,” Elastra offers to “design, deploy & manage database and application infrastructure in the Cloud in minutes – all with the click of a button.” Dedicated to providing companies building applications with a way to radically innovate the way they develop their products and deliver them on IT infrastructure, Elastra’s aim is to help a company “unlock the value of cloud computing by using virtualized hardware environments with cloud-provisioned database and infrastructure software that are easily configurable and do not require scripting, respond elastically to changing load and are delivered in the cloud with meter-based pricing.”

EMC - When creating a Cloud Computing division within the company in February 2008, EMC CEO Joe Tucci delared that 85 percent of data will be managed in what he called “big, safe information repositories in the Internet ’sky,’ so to speak. We’re [talking] cloud computing…”

Engine Yard – As a company dedicated to “furthering innovation in Ruby, Rails and cloud computing,” Engine Yard offers Rails-focused “24/7 operations support on top of great infrastructure” to companies in search of a smooth path from 100 users to 100,000 users. In July 2008 the company closed $15 million of Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), which included participation from Amazon.com. It has two PaaS products, xCloud and AppCloud, both based exclusively on open source technology.

ENKI – The company aim is “to allow you to focus on delivering your application to your customers while we handle the operations side: providing computing as a reliable service.”

Enomaly – Enomaly offers the “Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform” or “Enomaly ECP” – which it describes as being “the answer for service providers that want to leverage the power, flexibility, and compelling economics of cloud computing.” The aim of ECP is to empower carriers, xSPs and enterprise end-user organizations to deliver infrastructure-on-demand services to their customers and stakeholders.

Eucalyptus

eVapt – Claims to enable “usage based monetization (instant SaaS metering) for SaaS and Cloud Computing vendors.”

EyeOS -

Flexiant - UK-based Flexiant offers what it calls “pay-as-you-go utility computing solutions, both as a public platform (FlexiScale) and as a licensed product for data center owners (Extility). The company describes its FlexiScale 2.0 as “a complete rebuild of Europe’s first cloud platform using Flexiant’s revolutionary Extility technology.”

FlexiScale – The brainchild of CEO Tony Lucas, FlexiScale is a flexible, scalable, automated hosting platform (“Cloud Computing On-Demand”). Lays claim on its site to being “Europe’s first cloud platform,” and FlexiScale 2.0, a public cloud launched in June 2010, shows it is still developing actively.

Force.com - see Salesforce.com

Fortress ITX

G.ho.st

GigaSpaces – Founded in 2000, with offices in the US, Europe and Asia, GigaSpaces allows businesses and developers “to predictably scale on-line systems under any peak demand, guarantee real-time performance under any data processing load and seamlessly leverage the economies of scale offered by virtual computing environments such as clouds and grids.”

Go Cloud – see CSS Corp

GoGrid/ServPath – Launched in 2006 as ServePath’s latest growth opportunity, GoGrid, claims the company, “delivers true ‘Control in the Cloud’ by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting.” In other words, with GoGrid customers can grow production servers in real time to meet demand without affecting their uptime. Provisioning and de-provisioning of servers is all done via the Internet.

Google - Without a doubt ‘the elephant in the cloud’ – According to this well-researched article, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing.

gOS – Founded in early 2007, Good OS is an operating system software company based in Silicon Valley, California, USA and Taipei, Taiwan. Its mission is: “to enable cloud computing through software.”

Greenqloud – Based in Iceland, Greenqloud’s founders call it “the world’s first truly green public compute cloud.” It uses only clean and renewable geothermal and hydro energy sources to power its infrastructure. Being in Iceland there is obviously an abundance of geothermal energy and free cooling but Iceland is also a network hub with redundant low latency multi-terabit fiber connections to N-America and Europe making it much cheaper to serve both markets at once.

Grid Dynamics – Technology consultancy that helps customers “architect, design and deliver business systems that handle peak loads, scale on demand and always stay up – using the latest advances in grid and cloud computing.”

Hadoop - See Apache Hadoop

Heroku – According to the San Francisco-based company’s founders, “Heroku means never thinking about hosting or servers again.” In May 2008 they raised a $3M round of funding for their online deployment system for Ruby on Rails apps. In May 2010 that was followed by a $10M Series B round. A company that testifies to the success of Ruby as a language for building cloud apps, Heroku is a Y! Combinator start-up.

Hosting.com

HP – As long ago as 2009, HP announced its “HP Cloud Assure” offering, a SaaS offering designed “to help businesses safely and effectively adopt cloud-based services.” Then in January 2010 Microsoft and HP announced a joint $250M investment over the next three years to create an optimized platform for integrating Microsoft software and HP hardware – all part of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s vision of the cloud as nothing more really than “a modern architecture for how you build and deploy applications.”

Hubspan – Seattle-based Hubspan, the company behind the industry’s “first secure and reliable single-instance, multi-tenant integration platform delivered as a managed service,” has gained widespread traction worldwide with its flagship WebSpan cloud-based solution, a Software-as-a-Service integration platform leverages the SaaS model “to reduce the cost and complexity of integrating processes within and between enterprises.”

Hyperic – Founded in 2004, Hyperic provides complete, easy-to-use monitoring and management software for all types of web applications, including hosting it in the cloud via its CloudStatus dashboard currently in beta.

HyperOffice - A recognized leader in the white-hot online communication and collaboration solutions industry for small to mid sized businesses (SMBs), HyperOffice aims “to empower growing organizations with technology traditionally available only to large enterprises, and help them achieve business growth, competitive advantage and success.” The company was one of the first to offer software-as-a-service - and HyperOffice now has more than 300,000 users worldwide.

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

IBM – IBM approaches cloud computing “from the inside out” as it describes it. This means that Big Blue’s focus is on building the most secure, efficient and resilient infrastructure for today’s organizations, and building the cloud experience as part of that infrastructure. With more than a dozen Blue Cloud Computing Centers worldwide, IBM provides cloud services, ready for use, designed to assist organizations in proving a cloud experience for their constituents. In addition, IBM is the premier company to help build an organization’s private cloud, or leverage any of the many IT services that are today provided by IBM through cloud computing, like Capacity on Demand, or the IBM Information Protection Services.

iCloud - Swedish-based iCloud offers what it calls a “consumer Cloud computer.” Describing it as “an affordable and easy to use cloud-based home server with open APIs,” the company behind it, Xcerion, provides its users with a full remote management desktop to handle the online computer and manage uploaded files. Xcerion describes iCloud as a “Cloud OS” based on 22 pending patents: in short, a computer online.

IMOD – see Kaavo

Intalio - Led by the charismatic Ismael Ghalimi (Co-Founder & CEO), Intalio has since 1999 kept itself at the Enterprise IT forefont, and now provides what it calls “an integrated portfolio of applications for cloud computing.” The Intalio|Cloud offering is available through three editions, and the company now calls itself “The Private Cloud Company”.

Intel - Intel believes in Open Cloud Standards and one commentator believes there is a strong correlation between how fast cloud computing can proliferate and how well Intel plays its role to lead the open cloud solutions at IaaS and PaaS layers.

Interoute – Europe’s largest and most advanced fibre optic network, the Interoute platform operates as effectively Europe’s largest privately owned cloud.

Intuit – In April 2008 Intuit launched Intuit Cloud, a cloud computing platform based on Adobe Flex with QuickBase.

Iomart – One of the UK’s largest “managed hosting and cloud computing services” companies, iomart Group plc – with its “Step Up to the Cloud” slogan – aims to be the UK market leader.

iTricity

Joyent – The Joyent platform, which “enables teams to effectively communicate and collaborate with email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and other shared applications,” already serves billions of Web pages every month and helped LinkedIn scale to 1 billion page views per month. Self-described as an “On-Demand Computing” provider, Joyent has developed, built and scaled some of the earliest Ruby on Rails applications – and as a result, developed a world-class infrastructure, a methodology around how to deploy and scale (both up and down) Rails applications.

JumpBox – Describes itself as a supplier of “Instant Infrastructure.” Specifically, it is a ready-to-deploy virtual computer that contains a pre-configured instance of an application.

Juniper Networks -

Kaavo – provides a platform for managing distributed applications in the clouds. Kaavo’s core product, Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD), “makes it easier for individuals and businesses to implement on-demand infrastructure and middleware and run secure and scalable web services and applications.” The Kaavo philosophy is that taking a top down application-centric approach of managing infrastructure and middleware makes it easy to fully automate application lifecycle management.

Kadient -

Keynote Systems – Long a player in the SaaS space, in 2009 Keynote opened its cloud infrastructure and offered any Web team free access to KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment), its product for testing and analyzing the performance of Web applications across the Internet cloud. With a Web application’s performance depending on a variety of clouds’ infrastructures, ad servers and other third party content, potential pitfalls grow exponentially and Keynote contends understandably that “it’s more important than ever for Internet companies to test and measure applications to ensure a superior end user experience.” With KITE, companies have free access to Keynote’s cloud infrastructure and a tool to test and monitor their applications from cities all over the world.

Layered Technologies – Offers virtualization and cloud computing systems.

LinkedIn – see Joyent

LongJump – The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that LongJump offers is described by the company as “an on-demand platform for creating and delivering business applications to manage data, streamline collaborative processes and provide actionable analysis.” The company claims that the LongJump platform has “extensive features around security access, data analysis and visualization, and process automation – all on the web.”

Meeza – Qatar-based, Meeza is currently the main Cloud Services Provider within Middle East North Africa region.

Mezeo Software – Houston-based, privately funded software solution provider that has created what it calls “the industry’s first deployable, white label cloud storage platform, enabling service providers to quickly and efficiently enter the cloud storage market” (Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform).

Microsoft – According to this recent article – “Microsoft’s Cloud Vision is Coming Togethe r” – Redmond’s Cloud Platform vision is coming together. “Look for more information at PDC2008!” writes Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelist John C. Stame.

MindTouch – Describing itself as “an open source leader in enterprise Collaborative Networks and powers next generation intranets, extranets and knowledge bases,” MindTouch offers its MindTouch Cloud for collaboration “with the ease of a wiki but with the capabilities of a true enterprise platform.”

MindTouch Cloud – see MindTouch

Moab – see Adaptive Computing

Morgan Stanley -

MorphLabs – Describing itself as “a comprehensive cloud computing enabler for enterprise and service providers,” MorphLabs was established in 2006 “to make elastic computing possible for Enterprise Data Centers and Application Developers.” The company currently has presence in North America and Asian markets (its website is available in both English and Japanese versions), and its main offering is the mCloud series – which “virtualizes commodity hardware while simplifying system administration and application management.”

NaviSite – At 5th Cloud Expo in New York NaviSite launched its enterprise cloud based services, offered with guaranteed infrastructure and application SLAs, usage-based pricing, and delivered on its enterprise-class, highly available, scalable and secure application-focused NaviCloud platform.

Netsuite

newScale – Adamant that self-service is essential for any public or private cloud, newScale provides a self-service IT storefront for the enterprise, “driving standards and service request automation – from the desktop to the data center, for physical, virtual, and cloud environments.” As noted by newScale CTO and founder, Rodrigo Fernando Flores, “Amazon has redefined the expectations and pricing for data center services. Make no mistake, they are competition for enterprise IT. Internal IT departments must get ahead of this challenge, by defining their own Service Catalog, introducing self-service, and deploying their own on-premise cloud.” In line with this viewpoint, newScale’s own Service Catalog offers a menu of standardized service options, self-service ordering, and billing for cloud resources – thereby “enabling the operating model for a private, internal, or hybrid cloud.”

Ning

Nirvanix – San Diego based Nirvanix provides an enterprise cloud offering, the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN) – a “fully-managed, secure cloud storage service developed for today’s enterprises.” Nirvanix SDN offers companies with more than 5TBs of data a highly scalable storage and delivery platform, The company has already raised more than $18 million in funding from world-class investors including Intel Capital. Customers include Fortune 50, media and entertainment and innovative Web 2.0 customers.

Novell - The recently-announced Novell Cloud Security Service “enables cloud service providers and Software-as-a-Service vendors to ensure their offerings meet the strict security and compliance standards required by global businesses.”

OpenNebula – OpenNebula is a widely used open-source tool for the efficient, dynamic and scalable management of VMs within datacenters (private clouds) involving a large amount of virtual and physical servers. It supports Xen, KVM and on-demand access to Amazon EC2. The tool is being used as core component in several cloud projects, such as RESERVOIR.

OpSource – Delivers a complete Web operations solution for software as a service and web companies. Its OpSource Cloud is currently in private beta, aimed at providing every user with a “Virtual Private Cloud” within the public cloud.

Oracle – The world’s largest business software company believes that Private Clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can mitigate concerns about security, quality of service, integration, compliance, lock-in, and long term costs of public clouds by giving the enterprise greater control.

OTOY

Parallels – Founded in 1999, Parallels optimizes computing by providing virtualization and automation software to businesses and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms. Parallels is working closely with a network of ISVs and service providers to enable them to build their cloud computing and software-as-a-service offerings, meeting the needs of end-user organizations of all size. Parallels technology is also used by large enterprises creating their own in-house clouds.

ParaScale – “Cloud storage” involves clustering tens to hundreds of servers together to act as one giant file repository with massive capacity and parallel throughput for a variety of applications. ParaScale’s software “enables the enterprise or service provider to build enormous storage pools on commodity hardware at an affordable cost.”

Penguin Computing – Penguin has launched an HPC cloud called Penguin on Demand (POD). Penguin is targeting researchers, scientists and engineers who need surge capacity for time-critical analyses or can’t afford their own HPC cluster.

Platform Computing – Founded in 1992, Platform is a pioneer and global leader in HPC (high-performance computing) and takes the view that there is an intersection between grid computing and cloud computing in that both cloud and grid propose an architecture that masks the complexity of managing thousands of commodity servers from their users.

Postcode Anywhere – UK-based Postcode Anywhere is a good example of a company that’s successfully monetizing cloud-based applications – in this case for UK and international addressing, cleansing and profiling. “We are a cloud computing company and people can benefit from all the tech stuff that enables people to run large scale businesses like the one we have built,” says co-founder Jamie Turner.

Q-layer

Qrimp

Quantivo – Claims to be “revolutionizing the Business Intelligence (BI) world by combining Cloud Computing with an innovative and patented ‘Affinity Analytics’ technology.” Company recently won the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s prestigious Emerging Technology Award in the Cloud Computing category.

Quickbase

Rackspace - Market-leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing services, Rackspace Hosting is “changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT.” Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, “integrating the industry’s best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable.” Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning “Fanatical Support,” furthering the company’s mission to be one of the world’s greatest service companies. Rackspace is recognized as one of FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best companies to work for in the US, ranking number 43 on the list. Rackspace’s portfolio of hosted IT services includes Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Email and Apps.

Red Hat - RH believes that its consistent dedication to open source and open standards will further the success of a strong cloud ecosystem. “By bringing together thousands of Red Hat-certified applications, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization we aim to deliver the next generation of computing architectures, today,” says a company spokesman.

Reservoir

Rhomobile – Rhomobile provides RhoHub, which is describes as “the world’s first Development-as-a-Service for Mobile.” RhoHub provides a cloud-based service for both smartphone app development and hosting of mobile applications.

RightNow – With its RightNow Secure Government Cloud, which meets intense levels of security certification and accreditation, RightNow has worked with more than 170 government clients who it claims are already implemented in the cloud. The company claims to be “the only vendor to launch a defense and government-ready SaaS product set that adheres to the stringent security and compliance requirements as set out by the various U.S. government regulating bodies.”

RightScale – RightScale offers a fully automated cloud management platform that enables organizations “to easily deploy and manage business critical applications across multiple clouds with complete control and portability.” The RightScale Cloud Management Platform is delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and is available in a range of editions, froma free Developer Edition to Enterprise Editions.

Rollbase

rPath – Founded in 2005, rPath helps organizations “realize the promise and avoid the perils” of cloud computing, “rPath’s Cloud Computing Adoption Model provides a pragmatic, actionable, step-by-step framework for achieving measurable benefits now, while laying the foundation for the strategic benefits of a cloud infrastructure over time.”

S3 -

SalesForce.com - has a toolkit for cloud computing development, Force.com.

Savvis – Provider of Savvis Cloud Compute, a “right-sized computing environment” launched in February 2009.

Secure Government Cloud – see RightNow

ServePath/GoGrid – Launched in 2006 as ServePath’s latest growth opportunity, GoGrid, claims the company, “delivers true ‘Control in the Cloud’ by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting.” In other words, with GoGrid customers can grow production servers in real time to meet demand without affecting their uptime. Provisioning and de-provisioning of servers is all done via the Internet.

SIMtone – Durham, NC based SIMtone has developed and commercialized a ‘Universal Cloud Computing Platform’ that allows network operators and businesses “to host, manage and quickly provision any cloud-hosted services, and ubiquitously deliver them to zero-touch terminals that can be standalone, low cost hardware appliances, or software terminals usable via browsers or on PCs, thin clients and mobile devices.”

Skytap - Seattle-based Skytap’s goal is “to bring the power and economics of cloud computing to all business applications, to make businesses agile and productive.” Its current product offering, Skytap Cloud, enables companies to develop, test, train, migrate and demo applications in the cloud without requiring any code or architectural changes. The company claims to deliver “70% cost reduction.”

SLA@SOI – SLA@SOI’s vision is “to create a business-ready service-oriented infrastructure that will empower the service economy in a flexible and dependable way.”

SmugMug – Founded 5 years ago, SmuMug calls itself “the ultimate in photosharing” since it offers unlimited storage and stores backup copies of each photo in multiple datacenters. With more than 315,000 paying customers already, and 288,000,000 photos, SmugMug is a QED of cloud computing.

SOASTA - No one who heard SOASTA speak at AJAXWorld in 2007 about best practices in AJAX testing will be surprised to hear that Web testing is also at the heart of its CloudTest offering, a Cloud-based testing solution “built on the cloud to enable application testing in the cloud.”

Spare Backup – Interestingly, this US-based provider of automated, online backup applications for home users and small businesses has made great inroads in Europe and is working with major UK retailers like Carphone Warehouse, Comet and DSGI PLC.

Stoneware – Stoneware’s webNetwork creates a private cloud platform and the virtual web desktop to access it. The company describes this as “a desktop interface built on Ajax [that] can be accessed from any common web browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. From the webOS interface, users can access all of their assigned web, Windows, and hosted applications.”

StorSimple - StorSimple provides what it calls a “cloud-ready storage appliance.” The aim is “to enable customers to seamlessly and securely use…cloud storage services with their existing data-center applications.” The company recently announced integration with Amazon, EMC, Iron Mountain, and Microsoft.

Stratos - see WSO2

StrikeIron IronCloud

Sun – see Oracle

Symplified – Symplified’s vision is to secure the Cloud and SaaS applications by providing what it calls “On-Demand Identity.” The company has developed SinglePoint, which it describes as “a massively scalable Internet utility that delivers access management, authentication, SSO, federation, auditing, compliance and administration capabilities for the cloud.” SinglePoint’s “connect once and integrate an ecosystem” unifies multiple cloud apps like Salesforce.com, Google, ADP, WebEx, Taleo, Xactly and many others.

Terremark – Offering ‘Enterprise Cloud’ services that “let you control a resource pool of processing, storage and networking and allow you to deploy server capacity on demand,” Terremark as years of experience managing complex, mission critical infrastructures and applications for leading companies around the world.

The GridLayer – see Layered Technologies

ThinkGrid -

Ubuntu – see Canonical

UC4 – UC4 products, which work across physical, virtual, and cloud computing environments, bring what the company calls “Intelligent Service Automation” to more than 1,700 companies worldwide – enabling automation, in effect, both on-premise and in the cloud. The company claims to be able to “Bridge the cloud automation gap between old and new applications and automate processing across your enterprise.”

Unisys -The Unisys cloud computing strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed, automated IT infrastructures to Unisys-managed cloud services. Using Unisys services and technologies, organizations can create a private cloud within their data centers, a public cloud through secure Unisys-managed cloud solutions, or a hybrid cloud solution combining the best of both private and Unisys-managed cloud services.

Univa UD – Univa UD is a leader and innovator in software solutions for cloud enablement. The company’s software suite includes infrastructure management and service governance for cloud and HPC environments and spans all 3 cloud scenarios: public, private and hybrid. “With Univa products, companies can build private internal compute clouds, create clusters in a public cloud, or span the two by cloudbursting from an internal to external environment on demand.”

vCloud - see VMware

Vertica – Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud is “an on-demand version of Vertica’s blazingly fast, grid-enabled columnar database hosted on Amazon’s EC2.”

Virtual Ark – Virtual Ark is committed to “delivering competitive advantage to major global customers through outsourced IT application management in the cloud.” The newly launched company’s aim is to be the leading global provider of Enterprise Application Managed Services in specific industries to major global customers on Cloud Computing Infrastructure.

Virtual Workspaces

VMware – “A virtualization leader and pioneer, VMware has effectively delivered the technology that makes today’s clouds possible. With the pervasive presence of VMware in many accounts, enterprises are leveraging their virtualization infrastructure to build internal clouds, and leverage technology like VMotion to flex resources for DR or test and development to external clouds, as needed.” Its vCloud initiative, says the company, “offers users of all sizes this robust and reliable platform, support for any application on or off site, and choice from over 100 service providers worldwide who deliver the cloud on VMware.” Another usefully concise vCloud summary is at its Twitter stream: ” VMware vCloud delivers a single way to run, manage, and secure your applications where you want them, when you want them.”

WebSpan - see Hubspan

WorkXpress – PaaS pioneer WorkXpress released v 2.0 of its flagship customizable software platform in April 2009. “WorkXpress 2.0 is the world’s most functional PaaS (Platform as a Service)” claimed the Company in an accompanying statement.

WSO2 – Long known as an Apache-oriented firm specializing in lightweight services infrastructure, WSO2 began offering in June 2010 a private cloud building platform, Stratos.

Xcerion – see iCloud

xCloud - see EngineYard

Yahoo!

Zetta – Provider of what it describes as “best-in-class NAS storage in the cloud.” Zetta’s founders are the team who commercialized the web as the leaders of Netscape.

Zimory – A spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Zimory “enables dynamic, on-demand movement of applications automatically between servers in one or many locations, as well as creating the world’s first marketplace for computing capacity.” Based in Berlin, the company develops a dynamic infrastructure solution for data centers to create a modern Adaptive Cloud Infrastructure – “improving flexibility and reducing operating costs.”

Zoho

Zuora – With its “Powering the Business Cloud” slogan, Zuora has planted its flag firmly atop the Cloud Billing mountain. The company describes its Z-Commerce Platform as “the first commerce platform for cloud developers.”

Types of Cloud Service Development

Yousef — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:18:11 +0000

The concept of cloud services development encompasses several different types of development. Let’s look at the different ways a company can use cloud computing to develop its own business applications.

Software as a Service

Software as a service, or SaaS, is probably the most common type of cloud service development. With SaaS, a single application is delivered to thousands of users from the vendor’s servers. Customers don’t pay for owning the software; rather, they pay for using it. Users access an application via an API accessible over the web.

Each organization served by the vendor is called a tenant, and this type of arrangement is called a multitenant architecture. The vendor’s servers are virtually partitioned so that each organization works with a customized virtual application instance.

For customers, SaaS requires no upfront investment in servers or software licensing. For the application developer, there is only one application to maintain for multiple clients. Many different types of companies are developing applications using the SaaS model. Perhaps the best-known SaaS applications are those offered by Google to its consumer base.

Platform as a Service

In this variation of SaaS, the development environment is offered as a service. The developer uses the “building blocks” of the vendor’s development environment to create his own custom application. It’s kind of like creating an application using Legos; building the app is made easier by use of these predefined blocks of code, even if the resulting app is somewhat constrained by the types of code blocks available.

Web Services

A web service is an application that operates over a network—typically, over the Internet. Most typically, a web service is an API that can be accessed over the Internet. The service is then executed on a remote system that hosts the requested services.

This type of web API lets developers exploit shared functionality over the Internet, rather than deliver their own full-blown applications. The result is a customized web-based application where a large hunk of that application is delivered by a third party, thus easing development and bandwidth demands for the custom program.

A good example of web services are the “mashups” created by users of the Google Maps API. With these custom apps, the data that feeds the map is provided by the developer, where the engine that creates the map itself is provided by Google. The developer doesn’t have to code or serve a map application; all he has to do is hook into Google’s web API.

As you might suspect, the advantages of web services include faster (and lower-cost) application development, leaner applications, and reduced storage and bandwidth demands. In essence, web services keep developers from having to reinvent the wheel every time they develop a new application. By reusing code from the web services provider, they get a jump-start on the development of their own applications.

On-Demand Computing

As the name implies, on-demand computing packages computer resources (processing, storage, and so forth) as a metered service similar to that of a public utility. In this model, customers pay for as much or as little processing and storage as they need. Companies that have large demand peaks followed by much lower normal usage periods particularly benefit from utility computing.

The company pays more for their peak usage, of course, but their bills rapidly decline when the peak ends and normal usage patterns resume. Clients of on-demand computing services essentially use these services as offsite virtual servers. Instead of investing in their own physical infrastructure, a company operates on a pay-as- you-go plan with a cloud services provider. On-demand computing itself is not a new concept, but has acquired new life thanks to cloud computing. In previous years, on-demand computing was provided from a single server via some sort of time-sharing arrangement. Today, the service is based on large grids of computers operating as a single cloud.

What is Cloud storage?

Yousef — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:11:21 +0000

What Is Cloud Storage?

The servers used for cloud storage are typically hosted by third-party companies who operate large data centers. When you subscribe to a cloud storage service, you lease storage capacity from the cloud storage service. You then have access to the contracted amount of storage space, which you access via the Internet. What you see looks like a single server or hard disk, but it’s really just a virtual server. In reality, your data may be stored across multiple servers, sometimes spanning multiple locations (or even continents!) that then appear to be a single server in your storage dashboard.
Know that true cloud storage is massive. We’re not talking mere gigabytes and terabytes, as you might find on a desktop PC or web server. Instead, a cloud storage service might offer multiple petabytes of storage. The best-known cloud storage service today is probably Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Cloud storage is also offers by many other companies, with services either planned or rumored from IBM, Google, and EMC.

Why Use Cloud Storage?

Why is cloud storage such a big deal—especially to large companies? There are three primary benefits to cloud storage:

Scalability. When you rent cloud storage space, you can opt to use as much or as little space as you need. It’s easy to “flip and switch” and increase your storage space if you suddenly have larger storage needs. You don’t have to buy the additional computers required to house the extra data, but rather can use more of the space available in he cloud (and feel free to use as much space as you need).
Reliability. If you’ve ever had your company’s server go down, you know how important it is to have access to backup data. Well, cloud storage can be used as giant online backup drive. Even if you rely on cloud services for your primary data storage, you still have the peace of mind that comes from knowing your data is duplicated on multiple servers.
Lower costs. How much do you pay per terabyte of storage? Even with hard disk prices coming down, it’s still cheaper to use the virtual servers in the cloud. Cloud storage services can offer lower storage rates because they more efficiently use the server space they have; space gets reassigned to users almost instantly, on an as-needed basis. It’s a lot cheaper to use excess space in the cloud than it is to purchase a new server or hard disk drive

What is cloud computing?

Yousef — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:35:13 +0000

A cloud is a pool of virtualized computer resources that can:

Host a variety of different workloads, including batch-style back-end jobs and interactive, user-facing applications
Allow workloads to be deployed and scaled out quickly through the rapid provisioning of virtual machines or physical machines
Support redundant, self-recovering, highly scalable programming models that allow workloads to recover from many unavoidable hardware/software failures
Monitor resource use in real time to enable rebalancing of allocations when needed Cloud computing environments support grid computing by quickly providing physical and virtual servers on which the grid applications can run. Cloud computing should not be confused with grid computing. Grid computing involves dividing a large task into many smaller tasks that running parallel on separate servers. Grids require many computers, typically in the thousands, and commonly use servers, desktops, and laptops.

Clouds also support non grid environments, such as a three-tier Web architecture running standard or Web 2.0 applications. A cloud is more than a collection of computer resources because a cloud provides a mechanism to manage those resources. Management includes provisioning, change requests, reimaging, workload rebalancing, deprovisioning, and monitoring.

Check out the video below and my previous post on cloud computing to find out more.

The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

Yousef — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:46:13 +0000

Why would you choose to develop new applications using the cloud services model? There are several good reasons to do—and a few reasons to be, perhaps,a bit more cautious.

Advantages of Cloud Development

One of the underlying advantages of cloud development is that of economy of scale. By taking advantage of the infrastructure provided by a cloud computing

vendor, a developer can offer better, cheaper, and more reliable applications than is possible within a single enterprise. The application can utilize

the full resources of the cloud, if needed—without requiring a company to invest in similar physical resources.

Speaking of cost, because cloud services follow the one-to-many model, cost is significantly reduced over individual desktop program deployment. Instead of

purchasing or licensing physical copies of software programs (one for each desktop), cloud applications are typically “rented,” priced on a per-user basis.

It’s more of a subscription model than an asset purchase (and subsequent depreciation) model, which means there’s less up-front investment and a more

predictable monthly expense stream.

IT departments like cloud applications because all management activities are managed from a central location rather than from individual sites or workstations.

This enables IT staff to access applications remotely via the web. There’s also the advantage of quickly outfitting users with the software they need (known as “rapid provisioning), and adding more computing resources as more users tax the system (automatic scaling). When you need more storage space or bandwidth, companies can just add another virtual server from the cloud. It’s a lot easier than purchasing, installing, and configuring a new server in their data center.

For developers, it’s also easier to upgrade a cloud application than with traditional desktop software. Application features can be quickly and easily updated by upgrading the centralized application, instead of manually upgrading individual applications located on each and every desktop PC in the organization. With a cloud service, a single change affects every user running the application, which greatly reduces the developer’s workload.

Disadvantages of Cloud Development

Perhaps the biggest perceived disadvantage of cloud development is the same one that plagues all web-based applications: Is it secure? Web-based applications have long been considered potential security risks. For this reason, many businesses prefer to keep their applications, data, and IT operations under their own control.

That said, there have been few instances of data loss with cloud-hosted applications and storage. It could even be argued that a large cloud hosting operation is likely to have better data security and redundancy tools than the average enterprise. In any case, however, even the perceived security danger from hosting critical data and services offsite might discourage some companies from going this route. Another potential disadvantage is what happens if the cloud computing host goes offline. Although most companies say this isn’t possible, it has happened.

Amazon’s EC2 service suffered a massive outage on February 15, 2008, that wiped out some customer application data. (The outage was caused by a software deployment that erroneously terminated an unknown number of user instances.) For clients expecting a safe and secure platform, having that platform go down and your data disappear is a somewhat rude awakening. And, if a company relies on a third-party cloud platform to host all of its data with no other physical backup, that data can be at risk.

Annual Cloud Computing World Forum

Yousef — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:30:29 +0000

Hear from the leading suppliers, integrators and end-users to give you the complete picture on Cloud Computing and SaaS

Show Highlights:

3 day conference and exhibition on Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service
Co-located with CloudCamp London – Free-to-Attend unconference – click here to register
Co-located with the Green Enterprise World Forum – 1 day conference on Green IT
Free to attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre – click here to register
Free access to the Cloud Computing World Series Awards – visit www.cloudwf.com/awards for more information
Hear from leading case studies on how they have integrated Cloud Computing and SaaS into their working practices
Learn from the key players offering cloud and SaaS products and services
Benefit from our pre-show online meeting planner
Network in our combined exhibition and catering area
Networking drinks served each afternoon for all show attendees

29th June to 1st July 2010

Olympia Conference Centre, London

Booking Hotline – +44 (0) 845 519 1230

Cloud Computing is a Perfect Fit for Retailers

Yousef — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:47:16 +0000

Retailers today are working to do more with less. And for retailers seeking to get big results with minimal resources, cloud computing is beginning to look like a miracle.

In a recent Microsoft-commissioned survey of about 3,000 business decision-makers across the United States, nearly half of the respondents (48 percent) from the retail industry said that their companies have used cloud computing. One-third (32 percent) said that their companies were ready to move all applications to cloud computing.

So, what’s pulling retailers toward the cloud? It’s the ability of cloud computing to address three key challenges for retailers: focusing on core competencies, meeting unpredictable demands and improving customer service.

Refocus Investment on Core Competencies — not IT
Smart retailers are returning to core competencies in order to compete. That means more closely connecting with consumers. The NRF/KPMG research reported that more than two-thirds (67 percent) of respondents said customer database/data mining will be a priority for 2010.

Cloud computing enables retailers to focus their resources on the things that set them apart: Store portals, social media, digital marketing and employee retention. And it lets them invest less in maintaining, monitoring and updating shared working documents, e-mail and, operational data. Retailers have been quick to realize the benefits cloud offers. In fact, many of our early Microsoft Online Services customers were from the retail industry, including REEDS Jewelers.

As a full-service jewelry retailer operating online and in 16 U.S. states, REEDS needs fast, accurate information exchange between corporate staff and the chain’s 67 stores. Phone and paper-based communications were time-consuming and difficult to reference, and the company’s e-mail and collaboration systems were unstable and difficult to use. REEDS used Microsoft Online Services, which led to reduced infrastructure costs by 90 percent and e-mail support work by 80 percent, by hosting communications services in a Microsoft datacenter.

Pay for Just What You Need to Scale Up for Peaks in Demand
A second way in which cloud computing helps retailers is by better managing the peaks and valleys of holidays, unexpected demand surges, and weather events. In a typical IT environment, retailers need to able to scale fixed datacenter resources in advance of demand spikes. This leads to wasted capacity and increased costs. Even worse, it can mean an under supply, with network outages and crashed servers.

By taking advantage of cloud computing, retailers can dynamically adjust to the very dynamic nature of demand. Retailers only have to pay for the level of service they need, without the costs of unused capacity or under supply of capacity.

Improve Information-Sharing, Collaboration among Retail Workers
Finally, cloud computing transforms how retail employees collaborate and share information. Employees are perhaps a retailer’s most expensive and most valued assets. These deskless workers need to communicate with peers and share customer feedback. If the retailers don’t give them a forum, this younger generation of workers will create one themselves. For proof, just venture onto Facebook and search any retail organization. You’re likely to find an employee group created by the chain’s associates sharing everything from store promotion tips to company policy gripes. And it’s all in the public domain for your competitors to read — and act upon.

By implementing a hosted intranet with messaging, online meeting, and social networking tools that span time zones and geographies, such as SharePoint Online, retailers gain a more effective way for employees to collaborate — whether in the field, at corporate or at a supplier, improve information flow and create more time for customers. By providing access to all employees from any device, retailers can also save travel expenses while boosting productivity, feelings of corporate loyalty and time with customers.

At Microsoft, our advice for retailers is to pick a cloud computing platform that delivers a consistent, connected experience. Our approach to the cloud allows retailers to pick the right mix of hosted and on-premises solutions that make sense for their business.