Things All Cloudy: Oracle Takes The Inevitable Plunge The past week has witnessed Oracle making good on a pledge to adapt the (otherwise inevitable) shift towards cloud computing. The announcementcomes in an altogether different fashion, studded with overwhelming hardware and software resources, a fair mix of misdirection and a whole lot of competitor-bashing. Be reminded that the now embraced cloud computing model was once referred to as complete gibberish by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Well, as they say, it’s better late than never! A collection of online cloud-based offerings, termed by the company as Oracle Public Cloud, have been surgically
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Cloud Infographic: Facebook’s Cloud App Economy Source: EngineYard
Private Cloud Considerations The private cloud market is getting hot as plenty of advantages to enterprises in industries with higher-level security and compliance requirements are being offered. While the attractions are obvious, it must be noted that private cloud implementations can significantly differ from those of public clouds. If you are ready for the jump to private clouds, virtual private clouds (VPCs) or managed public clouds, you should make sure you understand the following: Workload and performance What are your performance and workload requirements? Can your applications run on virtual servers that are physically shared among multiple applications? If the
Multi–tenancy in the cloud: Understanding its benefits Multi–tenancy refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers, also known as tenants and is regarded as one of the essential attributes of Cloud Computing. Multi-tenancy is the key common attribute for both public and private clouds and it applies to all three layers of a cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Customers may have the ability to configure some parts of the application, such as the color of the user interface or business rules, but they can’t customize the application’s code. This means
US to Europe: “Eat My Cloud Dust” Europe may trump the United States in such matters as academic prosperity in mathematics and sciences, as we know it celebrates its monarchs with far more compelling pomp and circumstance that we could possibly muster for our heads of state. But clout in cloud remains one discipline in which America continues to exert overwhelming dominance over the continent across the pond. This isn’t to say that nations like France, Germany, and even economically beleaguered Greece aren’t curious about cloud and the shot in the arm it could offer to their collective IT acumen.
Unified Storage for the Cloud Means Higher-Level Interfaces In common use, the term “unified storage” means providing block-level and file-level access to the same storage system with a single management and control interface. Traditionally, block-level access is via fiber channel or iSCSI, and file-level access is via NFS or CIFS protocol. Recently, storage vendors are also adding _object_-level storage where the objects are entities with metadata like type, access control policies. Objects are read and written by applications using REST HTTP or SOAP and used directly at the application level. The most popular API is Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service). With the higher-abstraction level of objects, the underlying implementation (e.g.,
How To Reduce Risks In Cloud Computing Healthcare IT News survey results released recently show that 48% of respondents plan to include cloud computing in their IT projects, while 33% have already done so. However, the survey also found that 19% of respondents had no plans at all regarding cloud computing. The co-founder and president of ID Experts, Rick Kam, has a reason for this: security. The 19% of total respondents fear that cloud computing is not secure enough for their data. For health care institutions, entities, and providers in particular, it is data security that is of utmost importance,
