Archive for the ‘Cloud Providers’ Category
Topics that include or mention Various Cloud Providers
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 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 6, 2010
If you are a fellow twit like me then you know the infamous fail whale but I bet you wonder how this is related to cloud computing? Twitter, like Google, Facebook, Myspace, etc… are all examples of the cloud computing platform Software as a Service. This basically means that you don’t care where the application or servers are running from. They could be located next door, in New York City or Hong Kong. All you care is that the service is available to use when you want to use it and obviously when you get the #Fail #whale the service is not usable.
This makes me wonder what is causing the fail whale at the primary data center. A cloud computing data center is nothing more than a bunch of virtual servers all linked together so they can share processing, memory and resource pools to provide high availability for critical application servers. However, should there be an issue with the primary virtual host server then there is something called Vmotion which moves the virtual machine resources from one machine to another where there are more resources available. This could very well be the reason for the fail whale message as the server that is trying to serve up the requests isn’t able to process those at the same time as it is trying to move the virtual machine to another virtual host… it is curious if this is the issue and wonder what that means for other companies and or services looking to use the cloud as their preferred platform.
What are your thoughts on the cause of the fail whale is it the cloud or just too many twits?
Posted in Business Continuity, Cloud Availability, Cloud Computing, Cloud Hosting, Cloud Providers, SaaS | Tagged: Cloud computing for social media, cloud SLA for critical applications, Twitter Fail Whale | Leave a Comment »
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 »
Posted by brennels on June 23, 2010
This is an ironic story I cam across today posted on informationweek May 13th, 2010 “Recovery.gov Moved To Amazon Cloud”. With all the talk about using the cloud for recovering servers the irony is that the economic recovery trackings system is being moved becuase SaaS and the SLA of Amazon EC2 is more cost effective than attempting to build the data infrastructure required to host such a high volume critical application. I wonder how long it will take the public sector to begin to realize these benefits of using cloud computing as a recovery platform?
“Recovery.gov Moved To Amazon Cloud” by J. Nicholas Hoover InformationWeek May 13, 2010 04:14 pm
“The federal government hopes moving the stimulus-tracking Web site to Amazon EC2 will allow the recovery board to save money and refocus on its core mission.
The federal government has moved Recovery.gov, the Web site people can use to track spending under last year’s $787 million economic stimulus package, to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced Thursday. The move marks a milestone for the Obama administration’s cloud computing initiative. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra said in a conference call with reporters it is the first government-wide system to move to a cloud computing infrastructure. It’s also the first federal government production system to run on Amazon EC2, Kundra said.”
Read the full story here on informationweek.com
Posted in Amazon, Business Continuity, Cloud Architecture, SaaS | Tagged: Amazon EC2, Cloud Recovery, Recovery.gov, SaaS, Software as a Services | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on June 22, 2010
“How often do you hear about the latest Microsoft worm? Take, for example, the Conficker worm of 2009 that infected over 15 million machines, giving “back door” access to hackers, and making mission critical data completely insecure. The fact of the matter is that PC security breaches happen all the time, but don’t fret, there may be a solution.”
“With the advent of cloud computing, there has also been an increase in the security capabilities of everyone who takes advantage of cloud computing. The reason for this is quite simple – the providers of cloud computing services concentrate far more resources towards the security of the services they provide than the average PC user ever could. Why? For one, they have to in order to survive. But also, by definition, cloud computing service providers must utilize an assortment of technology that resides within specialized datacenters. In turn, these datacenters are built from the ground up with security and reliability as the foremost objectives.”
Read the full article here on trackvia.com
Posted in Cloud Availability, Cloud Hosting, Cloud Providers, Security | Tagged: Cloud Security, security of cloud computing | 1 Comment »
