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Cloud Computing Analysts encouraged by Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ progress
Jul 31st
Cloud Computing Analysts encouraged by Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ progress
SEATTLE (MarketWatch) — Wall Street analysts came away from Microsoft Corp.’s annual gathering encouraged by the company’s progress in adapting to a market in which software applications are increasingly delivered online, according to research reports published Friday.
Microsoft increasingly has been moving into so-called cloud computing, where software is accessed through an Internet connection, rather than installed in a user’s computer.
Younger rivals including Google Inc. (GOOG 484.85, -0.14, -0.03%) , Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN 117.89, +1.03, +0.88%) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM 98.95, +1.16, +1.19%) have sought to expand the cloud-computing market, while Microsoft has endeavored to alter its own approach to keep pace.
Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert pointed out that investors are shifting money out of Microsoft shares, based on concerns about how the company will develop new ways of making money.
Shares of Microsoft have fallen roughly 15% in the past three months, compared with a roughly 8% decline for the Nasdaq Composite Index (COMP 2,255, +3.01, +0.13%) over the same period. The stock closed Friday down slightly, at $25.81.
But Egbert wrote in a research note that concerns about Microsoft may be exaggerated, as the company has a history of adopting “technologies, mostly invented by others, to the mass market.”
Cloud evolution
“We’re going to lead with the cloud,” Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said at the company’s annual analyst meeting Thursday, while noting successes in vying for cloud-computing contracts against Google and International Business Machines Corp.
Microsoft “appears to be holding their own competitively” in cloud computing, Deutsche Bank analyst Todd Raker told clients in a note. “The bottom line is we believe the cloud is evolving from a secular threat to an opportunity” for the company.
However, Raker also acknowledged that the timing of any significant economic benefit from Microsoft’s cloud-computing effort remains “unclear,” noting that “we get significant pushback from investors on near-term reasons to own the stock.”
Some analysts argued that investors may not yet fully appreciate Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform service, which includes cloud computing and storage for customers hosted at the company’s data centers.
“While the buzz has picked up around Azure over the past 12 months, we do not believe the company gets enough credit,” Oppenheimer analyst Brad Reback told clients in his own research note.
“Azure should be a net revenue and profit creator” as more corporate customers snap up the service, he said.
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Cloud Computing 101 – How to Upload Files to Amazon S3
Jul 30th
Here is a very simple little S3 tutorial For those new to Cloud Computing and AWS S3 Thanks to S3Browser for the illustrations.
With S3 Browser you can upload any number of files to Amazon S3.
Here are the step-by-step instructions that explain how to upload/backup your files.
Start S3 Browser and select the bucket that you plan to use as destination. You can also create a new Amazon S3 Bucket if necessary.
- Click Files -> Upload File(s) on the menu or click the Upload button located on the toolbar. Or, click Files->Upload Folder if you want to upload a whole folder or whole drive.
- Now you will see a Select File dialog or Select Folder dialog depending on what option you have selected.
- You need to select the file or files that you want to upload and click OK. If you want to upload a folder please choose the folder and click OK.
S3 Browser will start uploading your files and will display the progress on the Transfers tab.
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Will cloud computing economics add up for Microsoft?
Jul 30th
By Larry Dignan at ZDnet
Microsoft at its financial analyst meeting made the case for being a cloud computing leader and argued that its economic prospects will improve as information technology shifts to an on-demand model.
The big question: Do you buy the argument that cloud computing will accelerate Microsoft’s earnings and revenue growth? Let’s face it: Every software vendor is talking cloud computing, but the economic theory is that it’s better to cannibalize your own business than allow some rival to do it. Few established software vendors have argued that the cloud will gussy up their financial metrics.
Microsoft CFO Peter Klein, however, made the case that cloud computing is going to be big business, improve the company’s gross margins, cut costs and bring in more customers. And, as noted by Altimeter partner Ray Wang, Klein did a decent job putting cloud computing in financial terms. It’s too early to put any hard data around Microsoft’s nascent Azure efforts, but Klein said that the software giant could grab a bigger piece of the enterprise IT pie. After all, the historical dividing lines between vendors—software, hardware, networking and storage—are melting away.
So how’s Microsoft going to harness the cloud for financial gain? Klein had a few big themes to ponder:
The cloud opens up a broader IT spending pie. In cloud computing, software, hardware and services blend together. You don’t buy servers. You buy capacity. Klein said:
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50 + Of The Biggest and Best Cloud Computing Companies
Jul 30th
Here is a cloud resource list that we’ve put together. The list has over 50 of the biggest and best up and coming Cloud Computing companies anywhere. If you’re interested in shifting to the cloud this would be a good place to start your search. We will include this in our Cloud Vendors section and will be constantly updating with new players and developments.
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Optimizing the Virtual Cloud
Jul 29th
BURBANK, CA–(Marketwire – July 29, 2010) – Cloud computing is a revolution for corporate data systems. Instead of having to install and maintain costly server hardware on-site, enterprises can now subscribe to a cloud service and literally use computing resources as they are needed. When they are no longer required, those resources are used elsewhere. The idea has firmly taken hold; a prominent motion-picture company recently turned to a cloud for their highly compute-intensive animation needs, and certainly saved major costs by not having to utilize in-house resources.
One element that makes cloud computing so attractive is its use of virtual servers. It boggles the mind to think that a user at a corporation can access the cloud and actually launch their very own complete server for needed tasks. When that task is done, that server is no longer needed and it simply ceases to exist. The incredible gains that virtualization has brought in hardware and space economics — to cloud computing and everywhere else — are still being realized.
But as we all know, while we all have our heads in the clouds it is important to keep our eyes on the ground as well. In the case of cloud computing, that “ground” is the hardware hosting virtual systems — hardware that is still subject to drastic system slows courtesy of file fragmentation.
All hard drives suffer from file fragmentation — and hard drives are the place that data for virtual systems, and hence a computing cloud, is stored. In comparison to a traditional server, a virtual environment has a few added steps to data storage and retrieval, however, and fragmentation can have even more of an impact. When a file request occurs on a virtual server, the I/O request is relayed, at the least, from the guest system to the host system — which means multiple requests are occurring for each file request. When a file is fragmented into hundreds or thousands of fragments, there are multiple I/O requests for each fragment. This operation creates an enormous amount of unnecessary overhead on disk subsystems.
Virtual disks also suffer from “bloat” — their sizes are dynamically set to grow, but they don’t shrink when users or applications remove data. This wastes the space that could be allocated to other virtual systems.
The latest in technology automatically and invisibly prevents a majority of fragmentation before it occurs, totally negating the effects of fragmentation in virtual environments. Because free space is also consolidated as part of the process, virtual disk “bloat” is eliminated. Enterprises can now take full advantage of cloud and virtual computing without ever having to worry about the performance drain from fragmentation again.
