Server Virtualization: Its Challenges and Benefits Guest Post By Anup Pal, Vice President, Global Solutions and Support, Symphony Services The adoption of server virtualization is becoming a very common trend in the industry to improve efficiency and availability of IT resources. The trend of having one server/one application is going away, making way for the adoption of virtualization technique that runs multiple operating systems/applications on a single hardware. With this technology in place, costs can be reduced 50 – 70% with respect to hardware and IT administration. Benefits of virtualization include: Multiple operating systems/applications on a single system Improved utilization
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Opportunities in Cloudsourcing By Cloudtweaks Over the last few years, there has been a shift towards cloud-based hosting of applications and infrastructure. It is a well-established process for a business to pass part, or even all, of its computing requirements to a cloud based supplier so that they can take advantage of the benefits. However, one of the biggest sources of outgoing for a business is staffing costs. How can the march to cloud computing help to reduce those for a business? A lot of businesses have periods when they require extra staffing for peak periods. This might be to
GridGain Interview With Nikita Inanov, CEO Cloudtweaks.com had an opportunity recently to speak with Nikita Inanov, the CEO of GridGains Systems. GridGain Systems is a privately funded startup company developing an innovative JVM-based Cloud Application Platform that enables rapid development of highly scalable SaaS or traditional enterprise and social web applications that scale on any grid or cloud infrastructure. Nikita has over 18 years of experience in software development, a vision and pragmatic view of where development technology is going, and high quality standards in software engineering and entrepreneurship holding various positions architecting and leading software product development for start-up
Email Resilience with the Cloud. By CloudTweaks Many organizations use Microsoft Exchange in one of its versions for their email. In most cases it runs perfectly fine for months at a time without problems, but as anyone who has ever tried to support Exchange knows, when it goes wrong it usually goes seriously wrong. While experience has shown the newer versions of Exchange, 2007 and 2010 to be significantly more stable than the older versions, there is always the possibility for downtime stopping users getting to their email. Google’s new service, Google Message Continuity, allows business users to constantly synchronize
Why Cloud Computing? Imagine the absence of a power grid throughout the nation, necessitating the presence of a generator in every home for producing electricity. Seems inefficient, doesn’t it? Well, if so be the case, why do we have our computers filled with software we use intermittently? Wouldn’t it be meaningful to use software the same way we use electricity – as and when we need it? This was the defining thought behind cloud computing, which has been defined as “Internet- based computing, whereby shared servers provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand.” The Internet
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Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection Security is still cited as a main reason by your large, stodgy corporations for staying clear of cloud computing. And while the cloud does have its security challenges, there is one key security benefit that cloud computing offers — Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) protection. After all, you can try to block, engineer and reroute traffic (difficult) or you can just throw more infrastructure at your attackers (easy) until they get tired of pumping traffic at your web servers. Amazon themselves exemplified this benefit by scaling up infrastructure to disrupt a recent DDOS attack
WikiLeaks and the Cloud DDOS Strategy I found the recent WikiLeaks saga to be fascinating. Never in history has the individual had so much power to collate and distribution sensitive information, with the ability to embarrass governments around the world and put them into damage control. But for a cloud computing vendor like myself, this story added an interesting twist. Within hours of releasing documents, the WikiLeaks servers were under heavy attack from patriotic individuals, and likely also governments, trying to stem the flow of information. It was a typical distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, which can usually shut-down an
