Archive for the ‘Cloud Architecture’ Category
Posted by brennels on August 4, 2010
“For SMBs who need to keep those servers rolling, Geminare shows that cloud-based server recovery can not only be affordable but also easy, and provide fast failback as well.
When I’ve talked to companies for articles about high availability, business continuity, or disaster recovery, particularly keeping server-oriented applications available, there’s often a Bermuda Triangle of handwaving fuzziness about the fail-over and the fail-back, glossing over the time and IT cost to get that transaction database up and running again, or to restore it when the main site is available again — hours to days to rebuilt a database, for example.
If I’m talking to a non-stop, fault-tolerant provider like Stratus, it doesn’t happen, but with many BC/DR solutions and their providers, it often feels like they’re being less than forthcoming about the realities. It often feels to me like while the acquisition cost of a fault-tolerant, high-availability solution may be greater than a BC/DR one (although not necessarily — see my ScaleMP post), but if there’s any actual need to utilize BC/DR, the total out-of-pocket cost including resuming operations can be higher (not to mention the cost of lost availability, productivity, and sales).”
Read the full article on informationweek.com
Posted in Business Continuity, Cloud Computing, Cloud Providers, Cloud Recovery, PaaS (Platform as a Service) | Tagged: Affordable cloud computing storage, Cloud computing for SMB's, Cloud Recovery | Leave a Comment »
Posted by visiondoubletake on August 3, 2010
Mark Russinovich is a legendary figure in the IT world because of his company Sysinternals.
He did so much reverse engineering of the Windows kernel that he ended up knowing it as much as the Microsoft architects. Microsoft acquired his company in 2006 and appointed him as Technical Fellow.
So far, his job has been related to the development of the Windows kernel (Windows 7 and beyond), taking care that its architecture was fully virtualization-aware.
Now a Microsoft developer evangelist, Matthijs Hoekstra, reports that he moved to the Windows Azure team.
While this may be completely unrelated, it seems yet another sign that Microsoft is preparing to launch the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) component of Azure.
While the platform is powered by a variant of Hyper-V, so far Microsoft only exposed its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities. But company clarified in multiple occasions (here and here for example) that Azure will compete with Amazon EC2 in offering hosted virtual machines.
Thanks to ZDNet for the news.
http://cloudcomputing.info/en/news/2010/08/mark-russinovich-joins-the-windows-azure-team.html
Posted in Azure, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Providers | Tagged: Cloud Computing Architecture, Microsoft Azure | 2 Comments »
Posted by brennels on August 2, 2010
Jon Brodkin, Network World Wednesday, July 28, 2010
“(07-28) 15:49 PDT – Amazon’s cloud computing division is planning to “raise the bar” on security, and provide better security than most enterprises can achieve on their own, says Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.
But some analysts believe Amazon is not transparent enough about its internal security practices, judging by comments after a presentation Vogels made at the Burton Group Catalyst conference in San Diego Wednesday.
Amazon called out over cloud security, secrecy
Vogels provided an optimistic view of cloud security, saying that cloud networks such as Amazon’s already provide better security, and disaster recovery, than most enterprises are capable of. “I believe the cloud is the area where we have to raise the bar for enterprise security,” Vogels said.”
Read the rest of the article on Networkworld.com
Posted in Amazon, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Computing, Cloud Providers, Security | Tagged: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels., Amazon ED2, Cloud Security | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on July 29, 2010
from Rackspace Cloud Computing & Hosting by Lew Moorman
Imagine a world where code used by the biggest clouds is freely available to any developer, anywhere. A world where that code was a standard used to build private clouds as well as a variety of new service offers. In this world, workloads could be moved around these clouds easily – you could fire your cloud provider for bad service or lack of features, but not have to rewrite the software to do it. Imagine an open source cloud operating system that lifts IT to the next level of innovation, just as Linux drove the web to new heights.
Today, we at Rackspace launched an ambitious project called OpenStack that aims to make this new world a reality.
I want to lay out the thinking that got us here and why we think this moment will change computing forever.
Read the rest of the article on the Rackspace blog here
Posted in Cloud Architecture, Cloud Providers, Cloud Recovery, Linux, Rackspace | Tagged: rackspace cloud blog, rackspace opening the cloud | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on July 29, 2010
By Stephanie Overby, CIO July 28, 2010 04:21 PM ET
I”T departments continue to proceed with caution when it comes to cloud computing, according to the results of a recent survey conducted by TPI.
The outsourcing consultancy polled 140 corporate IT decision makers about their cloud computing perspectives and plans and found that nearly four out of five companies are considering cloud computing solutions. Three out of five are actually implementing them.
Those organizations that are migrating some IT services to the cloud are doing so with small pilot projects or low-risk services, says Kevin Smilie, head of TPI’s new cloud computing business solutions unit.
“They aren’t convinced that these [cloud] services are ready for the prime time requirements of their core operations,” Smilie says. “They are testing non-critical portions of their infrastructure to learn about cloud services and their own management of them while limiting their operational risks.”
Read the full article on Networkworld.com
Posted in Cloud Architecture, Cloud Computing, PaaS (Platform as a Service) | Tagged: Cloud Computing, low risk systems being moved to cloud computing infrastructure | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on July 28, 2010
By: Vanessa Alvarez Publication: CIO.com Date: July 22, 2010
“As your enterprise adopts cloud solutions, it can be hard to determine what systems should stay and what should go.
Enterprises today have so much to think about when designing their overall data center strategies. It’s critical that a holistic approach be taken when laying out a data center design. The challenge for many CIOs and their IT organizations today is working with their partner to determine the best approach. First, what to do with the existing infrastructure in place?
With virtualization, many organizations rid themselves of physical servers, despite the significant dollar investment, and went to virtualization. Although many continue to do virtualization in a more phased approach, the understanding was that long-term, virtualization not only provided organizations with cost savings, but also better performance, agility, and flexibility, to name a few benefits. The point is, virtualization was not just about the cost savings, but about the value adds that it brought to the overall IT environment and ultimately, the business.”
read the rest of Vanessas’ article here on CIO.com
Posted in Cloud Architecture, Cloud Computing | Tagged: cloud computing models, data center expert | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on July 23, 2010
“Security is a top priority for Amazon Web Services. Providing a trustworthy infrastructure for you to develop and deploy applications is a responsibility we take very seriously. One important aspect of gaining your trust is being open and transparent about our security processes and continually working toward achieving industry-recognized certifications. Other important aspects include providing you with mechanisms for contacting us about potential security issues and enabling you to conduct security tests of the applications you deploy on AWS. I’m pleased to announce today two new policies: one that outlines our vulnerability reporting process and one that describes how to receive permission to conduct penetration tests of the applications running on your EC2 instances.”
Read the full post on the Amazon Web Services Blog here
Posted in Amazon, Cloud Computing, Cloud Hosting, Cloud Providers, IaaS, Security | Tagged: Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing Security | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on July 20, 2010
IT shops are in search of variable infrastructure pricing, which will take them to the cloud
“Computerworld – When debt collection agency Deca Financial Services LLC was formed last year it had two IT paths: It could buy its own servers, software licenses, and hire an administrator, at a total of cost of about $700,000, or it could turn to a cloud provider with first year costs of about $60,000.
At first, James Hefty, director of operations at the Fishers, Ind.-based company, didn’t believe a cloud provider was a possible option. It had financial compliance rules and concerns such as a client audit.
But the provider, in this case BlueLock LLC in nearby Indianapolis, said it could meet all the security rules, service levels and disaster recovery needs. “We very quickly realized with a little bit of analysis that everyone benefits from it,” Hefty said.
Deca has its own network, router and firewall and server in an Hewlett-Packard blade system and VMware environment.”
Read the full article here on computerworld.com
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Providers, HP, IaaS, Virtualization, VMware | Tagged: Cloud Computing, Computerworld, Hewlett Packard, VMware | 1 Comment »
Posted by brennels on July 14, 2010
Bill Claybrook, Contributor searchcloudcomputing.com 07.09.2010
Open source technology is going to seriously impact the cloud computing world, and there are two main reasons why: Open source software is essentially free, and it is not generally encumbered by the software license models of proprietary software. Many proprietary software vendors, such as Microsoft and Oracle, are trying to maintain old and expensive license models, even though they impede the flexibility gained by virtualization and cloud computing.
A number of open source tools have already had a huge impact on cloud computing: Linux and Xen, for example. But there are other important open source offerings that can benefit cloud users. These include KVM, Deltacloud, Eucalyptus, Cloud.com’s CloudStack Community Edition and OpenNebula.
KVM
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is an open source hypervisor for Linux running on x86 hardware. It contains virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). With KVM, you can run multiple virtual machines (VMs) running unmodified Linux or Windows images. KVM is an upstream hypervisor, sitting in the Linux kernel that converts the kernel into a bare metal hypervisor. Being upstream means that every Linux distribution ships with KVM. As the Linux kernel gets updates, KVM takes advantage of them automatically. KVM is supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Read the rest of the article on searchcloudcomputing.com
Posted in Cloud Architecture, Cloud Computing, IaaS, Linux, Open Source Virtualization | Tagged: Cloud Computing Architecture, IaaS, Linux Open Source virtualization | 2 Comments »
Posted by brennels on June 30, 2010
Posted by: Carl Brooks ITknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com
“Former ‘Master of Disaster’ at Amazon Jesse Robbins has a couple of fun tidbits to share about the birth of Amazon EC2. He said the reason it succeeded as an idea in Amazon’s giant retail machine was partly due to his inter-territorial corporate grumpiness and partly due to homesickness–not exactly the masterstroke of carefully planned skunkworks genius it’s been made out to be by some.
Robbins said Chris Pinkham, creator of EC2 along with Chris Brown (and later joined by Wiljem Van Biljon recruited in South Africa)was itching to go back to South Africa right around the time Amazon started noodling around with the idea of selling virtual servers. At the time, Robbins was in charge of all of Amazon’s outward facing web properties and keeping them running.
“Chris really, really wanted to be back in South Africa,” said Robbins, and rather than lose the formidable talent behind Amazon’s then VP of engineering, Amazon brass cleared the project and off they went with a freedom to innovate that many might be jealous of.”
Read the full article here on ITknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com
Posted in Amazon, Business Continuity, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Providers, IaaS, RaaS | Tagged: Amazon Web Services, Chris Pinkham, ec2, how to make a cloud, IaaS, Jesse Robbins, origin story | Leave a Comment »
