IT
HP’s Revised Proposal of $33 per Share Values 3PAR at $2.4 billion
Sep 2nd
HP Wins 3Par At $33, Beats Dell
Until this morning, Dell and Hewlett-Packard were mired in a bidding war over 3Par, a leading provider of utility storage solutions for enterprises. With a final bid of $2.4 billion for the company, HP has emerged the winner. Below we highlight the significance of 3Par and how it may impact HP’s storage in the future.
Utility storage primer
Utility storage is a category of data storage systems designed for utility computing, a form of information technology in which storage and computation are delivered as a metered service, rather like a power utility. 3Par’s unique storage technology powers so-called virtual data centers for mid-sized to large enterprises, including financial service firms, government entities, hosted computing providers, and consumer-oriented Internet companies.
3Par’s value proposition is based on the premise that unused storage is wasteful. Conventional data centers typically use just 10% to 25% of allocated disk space. By contrast, 3Par’s technology allocates disk space only when applications need storage capacity, reducing the total cost of storage by up to 50% according to the company.
As more enterprises shut down their in-house data centers and turn to on-demand storage and computing services delivered via the Internet, their storage needs become more variable and less predictable. This makes 3Par a great fit for the cloud computing era, which helps explain why HP and Dell are competing so fiercely to acquire the company’s proprietary technology.
Why were Dell & HP chasing 3Par?
(Source Forbes)
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Is Cloud an Adopted Brother of Virtualization or Not?
Sep 2nd
Is Cloud an Adopted Brother of Virtualization or Not?
By Nimantha (CloudTweaks)
Cloud computing came into the lime light very recently and became an instant hit among lot of people, especially CTO’s of different enterprises. Virtualization, the close friend of cloud computing was there for a longer period of time, but with the emergence of cloud, it was given the step mothers treatment. Still it didn’t die from our minds because Cloud and Virtualization did stick together most of the time rather than not. So then the argument began, Does Cloud and Virtualization does carry the same concept or is it different? Let’s figure it out.
What is Virtualization ?
The word virtualization defines of allowing multiplicity of access points from a single outlet. As an example, we can simply take interrelated personal computers that can each be accessed from whatever remote location. What it actually implies is that it will be using the internet to carry out activities that were previously done offline. In other words, the management or the CTO has decided that his organization would like to take control of the activities of that activity by going online rather than offline. Virtualization therefore always associates with technological development.
The best part of Virtualization is that the central command unit will be able to supervise the activities of outpost computers. This element is one which delights managers but it also causes some concern from civil liberties groups regarding their privacy.
What is Cloud Computing?
Well, here is the point where everyone gets confused. It is true that cloud computing utilizes the same basic principles as virtualization, but it involves the provision of externally managed IT services via hosted software, which allows IT systems to be managed from very remote locations where data is accessed and manipulated via a server.
As an example, lets say that there is a company in USA which wishes to reduce the budget they allocate for in-house developments, so what they decide to do is to totally outsource their IT developments to a company in India.
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Amazon AWS Lowers On-Demand and Reserved Prices
Sep 2nd
Amazon AWS Lowers On-Demand and Reserved Prices
Effective immediately, we have lowered the On-Demand and Reserved prices for High Memory Double Extra Large (m2.2xlarge) and Quadruple Extra Large (m2.4xlarge) instances for Linux/UNIX and Windows by up to 19%. If you have existing Reserved Instances, your hourly usage rate starting 
September 1st will be lowered to the new usage rate and your estimated bill will reflect these changes later this month. We continuously strive to be more efficient, and are excited to pass cost savings on to you in the form of lower prices.
Beyond this price reduction, there are several other ways that you can save money when using Amazon EC2. Compared to On-Demand instance pricing, Reserved Instances enable you to reduce the cost of your instances by up to 56%. When using Reserved Instances, you pay a low, one-time fee and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance during a 1 or 3 years period. After the one-time payment for an instance, that instance is reserved for you; you may choose to run that instance for the discounted usage rate for the duration of your term, or when you do not use the instance, you will not pay usage charges on it. Spot Instances also are available, which allow you to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run your instances for as long as your bid exceeds the current Spot Price. For customers who have flexibility in when they can run their instances, Spot Instances can significantly lower their Amazon EC2 costs.
You can find more detailed information about these options at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2.
Source Amazon
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Save $100 and join CloudTweaks at All About Mobile
Sep 1st
Save $100 and join CloudTweaks at All About Mobile, the ISV conference for mobile business, produced by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and taking place November 16-17, 2010 in San Jose, California.
ISVs large and small have already begun to transition software and cloud-based applications for use on mobile devices. In fact, in today’s marketplace, we ALL need to have a mobile strategy, which is why we are proud to support this unique industry conference and hope to see you there!
To take advantage of our $100 discount, enter promotional code PRMCTWE when you register online here. (Note: this discount is valid off the individual SIIA non-member rate only and does not apply to current attendees.)
You’ll save even more with early-bird rates through October 18.
All About Mobile features a robust conference agenda with keynotes from Microsoft and Sprint. And you’ll network with top executives from ISVs, carriers, platform providers, and infrastructure providers — along with the industry’s leading analysts, venture capitalists and media — all gathering to explore, debate and discuss the mobile movement.
For details, visit www.AllAboutMobile.net
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The Business Cloud Summit promises to be the UK’s premier Cloud event of 2010
Sep 1st
The Business Cloud Summit 2010 – 30 November, London, England
Visit our Event Partner for more information on this great Event.
The Business Cloud Summit 2010 will be Europe’s Cloud Computing event of the year. Unfolding over one day, it will comprise two highly focused streams, exploring current and future Cloud Computing issues in both the public and private sectors. The agenda will build on the success of the 2009 
Summit, delivering a unique mix of focus and leading industry insight, and ensuring that the 2010 Summit will be marked in the diaries of CIOs, CEOs and COOs from across the UK and Europe.
With dedicated content streams covering the key issues in both the public and private sectors, this one-day event will include top-level insight, relevant to all forward-thinking technology professionals, across all industries and all sectors; drilling down into the Cloud issues that affect central and local government, the NHS, education and the third sector.
The Business Cloud Summit is the only UK event of its type to offer specific content aimed at line of business managers in HR, finance, CRM and IT. It’s the only place where professionals from all areas of the Cloud industry will be brought together under one roof; infrastructure providers, buyers, end-users, influencers and decision makers.
The Cloud for 2010
According to IDC, 2009 was the year that Cloud Computing was ‘seeded’. In 2010 Cloud computing is now part of the mainstream. End users are embracing the cost and productivity benefits of the model with enthusiasm. At a time when the world is still emerging carefully from the worst economic downturn in living memory, lower start-up costs and total cost of ownership of Cloud Computing, delivering ROI of over 1000% in some cases, are welcomed with enthusiasm by CIOs, CEOs and CFOs in organisations across every business sector.
2010 is the year of Cloud adoption:
- By 2012, a fifth of all businesses will own no IT assets – Gartner
- The Cloud services market will surge to around $150bn in 2013 – Gartner
- The market for cloud services will account for 10% of all IT spending by 2013 – IDC
For more information see: http://www.businesscloud9.com/summit/2010
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NetApp Alliance Partner, Showcases Cloud Orchestration Technology at VMworld 2010
Sep 1st
SANTA CLARA, CA–(Marketwire) – Gale Technologies, a leading provider of innovative software solutions that simplify and automate IT resource 
provisioning and workflow orchestration for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions, today announced its participation at VMworld® 2010 San Francisco, August 30 – September 2, 2010, where it will showcase its award-winning cloud orchestration and data center automation solution, GaleForce.
Gale Technologies offers GaleForce, an advanced IT automation and workflow orchestration platform that quickly and efficiently automates the management and provisioning of virtual and physical resources in the lab, data center, or cloud. GaleForce is the first true, end-to-end cloud orchestration and data center automation platform that manages multi-vendor and multi-technology environments, spanning across computing, networking, and storage resources. In addition to providing a comprehensive automation platform, GaleForce also offers a custom-brandable web portal to enable self-service provisioning of IT resources.
Gale Technologies will co-demonstrate its award-winning solution GaleForce at the NetApp booth (#601) at VMworld® 2010 in San Francisco, August 30 – September 2, 2010. The demo will illustrate support for secure multi-tenancy to help organizations develop internal and external cloud services that isolate clients, business units, departments or security zones for enhanced security in a virtualized infrastructure across the computing, networking, storage and management layers.
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Practically Speaking about Amazon Web Services – Part 2: A Cloud Giant
Sep 1st
Practically Speaking about Amazon Web Services – Part 2: A Cloud Giant
We saw the various innovative cloud products and services offered by Amazon Web Services in Part 1. At this stage, it is quite natural that we have the business economics going on in our mind as how big is the cloud business industry and what part is being played by Amazon. Let us have a look at how Amazon Web Services has fared in analysts views. After all, before Amazon Web Services came along, Amazon was the least known for putting up a fight with IT Giants: such as: Microsoft, IBM, Google etc., where they not?
IDC, in a press release dated June 23rd,2010, says that global revenue of public cloud services which was around $ 16 Billion in 2009 will grow to $ 55.5 Billion in 2014. The research report further states that IT cloud services are crossing the chasm with modest revenue; fastest growth of about CAGR 27.4%.
-Reference: Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2010–2014 Forecast by IDC – (IDC #223549)
Another report released by UBS Investment Research analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald says that, for the type of cloud services offered by Amazon Web Services the market size can be pegged at around $ 15 to 20 Billion in the year 2014.
As per analysts, Amazon Web Services clocked revenue of about $ 0.5 Billion in 2010; could go up to $ 2.54 Billion in 2014. And this is about a 5% of total market share! And a market share of about 15% in similar services! Analysts predict that from the last quarter of 2010, Amazon Web Services revenue will have an impact on Amazon Inc., as a company. Well, not minding accuracy of these market share figures, one can clearly say that Amazon is an early pioneer player poised to grow big.
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Cloud Market Leaders Turn to 3PAR and VMware for Cloud-Scale Virtualization
Aug 31st
SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – August 31, 2010) – Today at VMworld 2010, 3PAR® (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced that cloud computing market leaders in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) segments have combined the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server with VMware vSphere™ to build agile and efficient cloud infrastructures for their shared, virtualized “utility” service offerings.
Of the global cloud computing IaaS leaders, 7 of the top 10 deploy 3PAR and VMware for their shared, virtualized service offerings. Among these service providers, several are also 3PAR Cloud-Agile Global Partners, including Attenda, VMware’s EMEA and Global Service Provider Partner of the Year for 2010. As both a Cloud-Agile: ASSURED and Cloud-Agile: SECURED partner, Attenda uses 3PAR Utility Storage to offer both disaster recovery and Virtual Private Array (VPA) services.
“Our cloud computing platform, Attenda RTI, utilizes best-of-breed VMware virtualization technology integrated with a shared virtualized platform of 3PAR storage and Cisco networking, providing rapid scalability for unprecedented business agility,” said Simon Hansford, VP Service Strategy and Marketing at Attenda. “With over 60 clients deploying business-critical, enterprise-class applications into the cloud, our clients are recognizing the need to improve IT efficiency and increase business agility through the adoption of infrastructure-as-a-service.”
3PAR Utility Storage was designed from the ground up to feature a scalable, clustered, multi-tenant architecture and to provide the optimal storage infrastructure for virtual datacenters and the delivery of IT as a service. When deployed together, highly virtualized storage from 3PAR and server virtualization technology from VMware have enabled joint customers to increase VMware vSphere™ return on investment (ROI) for cloud service delivery. This is due to 3PAR’s efficient thin technologies, flexible, “autonomic” administration, and tight integration around VMware’s vStorage initiatives.
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Confessions of a Cloudaholic
Aug 31st
Confessions of a Cloudaholic – Life in the Cloud
By Nimantha De Silva of CloudTweaks – Aug 31st, 2010
The script is written, actors are ready, it’s time to say ACTION, but hold on, this time it is not about a film, it is just about unveiling the script of Challenges faced in Cloud Computing. This article purely focuses on challenges faced on cloud computing along with how it’s architecture is made of and its key characteristics to make it so special. A real confession is about to make and lets follow it.
Introduction
Cloud computing, from its evolve itself has become a major talking point. There were wide spread consensus among many industrial observers to check whether it is ready for noticeable deployment in the year 2010. So before digging deep into cloud, lets figure out what cloud computing is defined for. Even though it was introduced sometime back, it can still be identified as in the emerging stage, so there are many definitions based on several releases, but the most appropriate according to my view is the definition given by Wikipedia saying “Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and a delivery model for IT services based on Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the internet”. With the introduction itself, this topic was subjected towards many discussions, arguments, reviews, etc… Many expressed their ideas over this new born kid, but it was not to stop it but to make it much better. From that time onwards, cloud did grow and overcame many obstacles, but it is not finished yet. There are a certain set of challenges which needs to be addressed. The challenges which came into limelight along with the boom of the cloud are as follows:
- Who has given rights to access the information that organizations are putting on these external cloud application and systems servers?
- What and how does an organization’s compliance posture for applicable laws, regulations, standards, contracts and policies change when business, and sometimes even customer and employee, information is stored in the clouds?
- How long does information put into the clouds stay in those clouds?
- Do the clouds have retention policies?
- Can information be permanently and completed removed from the clouds once it is put there?
- Are there any logs generated to show how that cloudy information is accessed, copied, modified and otherwise used by anyone else?
- Can all necessary information in clouds be easily retrieved during e-discovery activities? If so, what are the related costs involved in it?
Even though cloud has not reached its peak yet, there are certain level of growth in cloud usage from the year 2008 to 2010, mainly due to its change of architecture. Lets figure out how the architecture is built to make cloud look more clearer than earlier.
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Top 30 Cloud Service Providers Gaining Mind Share in 3Q 2010
Aug 31st
Top 30 Cloud Service Providers Gaining Mind Share
Article by: Ray DePena with Cloud Expo
Image Credit to incomingit.com
It has certainly been an exciting week in the Cloudsphere with Dell and HP battling it out over 3PAR. It’s clear who is on Dell and HP’s radar, and I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of 2010 Cloud acquisitions as the segment continues to consolidate.
Its been almost 2 quarters since the last report, though the BTC Logic team has done an excellent job in their Top Ten Cloud Companies in 2Q10 Report to pick up the slack. CRN released The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors list joining the The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing, 85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud, 50 of The Biggest and Best Cloud Computing Companies, The VAR Guy’s SaaS 20 Index, and even Congress has gotten into the Cloud game – Congress Holds Hearing on Cloud Computing.
With that M&A activity as background, here are my rankings for the Top 30 Cloud Service Providers Gaining Mind Share in 3Q 2010.
