HP Enterprise Cloud Software Platform

The Cirious vision is to lead HP in becoming the foremost Service Providers’ Service Provider, delivering a set of cloud capabilities that enable service providers to take full advantage of the power of the cloud. Our work enables service providers of all types to tap into foundational cloud capabilities – general purpose horizontal capabilities as well as those tailored for specific industry verticals – that make it easy for them to develop, host and manage their services to deliver value from the cloud, and to integrate with an ecosystem of services from other providers.

Social Computing

Our works aims to harness the collective intelligence of the connected population inside and outside enterprises to create novel technologies and services. Ours is an interdisciplinary approach, combining sociology, economics, and computer science. We focus on the science of attention, creating models to understand and harness the flow of collective attention, supporting a mobile society with context-aware and anticipative technology, and enabling a fluid enterprise, where collective intelligence is harnessed via appropriate incentives to predict the future, make decisions, and allocate resources.

HP Cloud ]]> http://www.cloudtweaks.com/cloud-vendors/hp-cloud/feed/ 0 http://www.cloudtweaks.com/cloud-vendors/amazon-elastic-compute-cloud/ http://www.cloudtweaks.com/cloud-vendors/amazon-elastic-compute-cloud/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:37:42 +0000 cloudtweaks http://www.cloudtweaks.com/

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

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.

Here is a good list of 25 Cloud Blogs to start the day that offer a variety of information related to Cloud Computing.

Reuven Cohen’s ElasticVapor Blog

CloudSecurity.org

John Willis’ IT Management and Cloud Blog

CloudComputing Journal

HostedFTP Cloud

TmForum

Mobile Internet Computing

Randy Bias’ blog

Sam Johnston

CloudCasts (Cloud Podcasts)

For more than 30 years, NEA has been helping to build great companies. Our committed capital has grown to $11 billion and we’ve funded more than 650 companies in the Information Technology, Energy Technology and Healthcare sectors.

For more than 49 years, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) has actively partnered with entrepreneurs to build and grow successful businesses. The firm manages more than $3.7 billion in capital, has funded over 450 companies since inception and has demonstrated an exemplary track record producing premier investment returns during differing capital market environments

U.S. Venture Partners

Ignition Partners

Ignition is a venture capital firm dedicated to helping the best entrepreneurs seize opportunity.
From turning their early idea into a business, to hiring the right team, providing the right industry and functional insight and connections, to growing the business strategically, globally, financially, to realizing the best ultimate outcome, Ignition is ready to go the distance.
Ignition invests in emerging and future leaders in communications, internet, software, and services across business and consumer targets.

Sequoia

Sequoia Capital in the U.S. caters to the founders and management who have selected us as their business partners. We have learned that the only way to help develop a fabulous company is one step at a time. This only happens if the company makes wonderful products or delivers a service that thrills large numbers of customers. If that occurs then founders, management, and employees of these companies prosper. It is only then that the investor deserves to be rewarded. It has to happen in that order. There are no shortcuts.

First Round Capital

First Round Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm.  As seed-stage investors, we often provide a company’s first outside capital – and typically invest alongside angel investors.  Our typical initial investment in a company is around  $500,000 – but we’ve gone both higher and lower.

We’re not afraid of investing in pre-revenue companies, and we understand the challenges of launching a new product. That’s why we like to take an active role in the companies we invest in.

Mission Ventures

Mission Ventures helps build successful enterprises in Southern California and creates superior returns on investment for its investors. This is accomplished by investing in the most promising early-stage companies in high growth, emerging markets, and providing significant assistance to those companies as they develop.

DAG Ventures

Is a venture capital partnership investing in and helping outstanding entrepreneurs create leading, long-term companies across a range of markets. With roots from the 1980’s in cable TV, infrastructure, media, and wireless industries, the partnership today is privileged to work with world-class entrepreneurs as they build tomorrow’s leaders in the information technology, energy, and life science sectors. DAG Ventures invests in companies with proven technology, from the prototype stage onward. For more information on current investments,

Hummer Windblad Venture Partners

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was founded in 1989 as the first venture capital fund to invest exclusively in software companies. Through our history, we’ve had the opportunity to invest in the pioneers and leaders of several generations of software applications, architectures, delivery methods and business models. We’ve helped entrepreneurs build companies in desktop software, embedded systems, client-server, distributed network computing, internet, software as a service and cloud computing.

Shasta Ventures

Was formed expressly to help entrepreneurs build great companies, our primary objective is to provide outstanding service to the companies in our portfolio. It means we have the time to work with early-stage companies because we serve on a limited number of boards. And it means we care about the companies we invest in—not only the businesses, but the people as well.

DreamWorks SKG has signed a multi-year deal with Cerelink for cloud computing access.

Instead of rendering movies like How To Train Your Dragon on thousands of its own computer cores, DreamWorks will use elastic compute resources housed in Cerelink’s supercomputing-class facility at the New Mexico Applications Centre (NMCAC).

“Elastic” cloud computing allows clients like DreamWorks SKG to dynamically adjust technical capacity to meet their real-time business needs.

Cerelink is a high performance cloud computing (cloud HPC) provider to the motion picture industry. It provides private clouds for rendering and other content creation and management application, based on a combination of data center space, scalable high performance computing and networking, in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

The Cerelink facilities include access to several thousand square feet of secure data centre space located in Rio Rancho, NM. That space is fed by redundant electrical power grids. It has access to LambdaRail (pdf), the 12,000 mile US coast-to-coast fast broadband network, and to a supercomputer at Encanto.

This offers a theoretical peak speed of 172 teraflops (peak theoretical speed) from its Altix ICE 8200 cluster, with 133 teraflops sustained operation. The ICE 8200 consists of 1,792 nodes (14,336 cores) of quad Xeon 3.0 GHz processors housed in 28 racks.

Cerelink’s private cloud computing service was used by DreamWorks Animation to render parts of Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon this year. Cerelink itself was founded by a group of ex-Intel managers in 2005.

James Ellington, its CEO, said: “We forecast growing our technical capacity by 20 times by the end of 2011 – this will create one of the largest cloud computing arrays for motion picture production in the world.”

This represents a threat to suppliers of in-house HPC compute and storage facilities to the movie rendering industry, such as BlueArc, DataDirect, Dell, HP, Isilon, and NetApp. If their customers start hiring rendering and animation HPC capacity from service suppliers such as Cerelink, then there will be less demand for in-house kit.

It is some distance from the movie mecca at Hollywood to New Mexico, raising the question of why the movie moguls should look at doing their rendering and animation in New Mexico?

The State offers film production incentives, like a 25 per cent tax rebate, for projects done in the state. Also, Cerelink and the NMCAC, in collaboration with the University of New Mexico, and the New Mexico Department of Information Technology, use an ultra-high-speed network link to link New Mexico to Hollywood.

Full Source: ChannelRegister ]]> http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/dreamworks-signs-cloud-computing-deal/feed/ 0 http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/ca-technologies-buys-its-way-into-cloud-fray/ http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/ca-technologies-buys-its-way-into-cloud-fray/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:33:56 +0000 cloudtweaks http://www.cloudtweaks.com/?p=2202

By Kevin Kwang, ZDNet Asia

Its 2010 acquisition blitz to date includes Oblicore, Nimsoft and 3Tera and shows no signs of slowing as CA Technologies (CA) continues its buying spree to “plug gaps” and bulk up on technical capabilities, particularly in the cloud environment.

According to Andi Mann, vice president of product marketing at CA, the company has “some money left to spend” on companies that will complement the technologies and capabilities it already has.

“Previously, we have been acquiring companies for revenue stream but with the acquisitions of Nimsoft, 3Tera and others, we are now looking to buy technologies that can solve the problems we see our customers struggling with in the cloud environment [such as vendor lock-in and platform interoperability],” Mann said in an interview with ZDNet Asia.

He noted that with these acquisitions in place, the company’s products are now able to operate atop various data center architectures such as x86, Linux and Unix.

Cloud thrust fueled by customer interest
Elaborating on the company’s move to focus heavily on the cloud, Mann said businesses in the region are showing strong demand for the delivery model.

He pointed to IDC’s cloud computing survey conducted in April this year, which showed that 25 percent of companies surveyed in six Asia-Pacific countries–Australia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, South Korea and India–said they currently use cloud computing.

This is more than double of a similar study conducted in 2009, when only 9 percent of respondents were actively using cloud technology, he said, noting that the increase is indicative of the market’s potential.

To illustrate CA’s cloud strategy, Mann cited the 3Tera acquisition as an example of how the company aims to address the issue of vendor lock-in for applications architected over on-demand infrastructure provided by cloud vendors such as Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

With 3Tera’s AppLogic technology, he explained that companies can now simply “click and drop” applications from existing datacenter systems to virtualized machines, thus, simplifying the architecting and deployment of complex software across various platforms.

The simplicity of the technology also helps alleviate the lack of skilled manpower to move organizations into cloud computing, he added.

According to Chris Morris, IDC’s Asia-Pacific services director, the recent global recession had resulted in a lack of enterprise investment in IT skills and employee training over a 12- to 18-month period. This caused the skills shortage, said Morris, who sat in on the interview.

Expanding on Asian presence
Further elaborating on CA’s cloud strategy, Andy Cooper, its vice president of regional field marketing, said the Nimsoft acquisition will help increase the company’s presence in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in the area of providing scalability which is a key feature of cloud computing.

Cooper explained that the number of big organizations in the region is comparably lower than the United States and Europe, but this landscape is set to change. And as Asia-Pacific midsize companies prepare to expand, CA–through its Nimsoft capabilities–is hoping to target this group of customers and provide the scalability they need to grow.

In a statement announcing the acquisition in March, CA said Nimsoft offers “one of the most comprehensive suites of IT monitoring and management solutions”. It will also provide organizations insights into application behaviors and infrastructure health and help ensure the reliability of critical business services and optimize hardware utilization, the company added.

In an earlier report by ZDNet Asia’s sister site, ZDNet, Deutsche Bank analyst Todd Raker said CA, due to its differentiated product lineup, is well-positioned to take advantage of these opportunities in the virtualization and cloud space.

Raker added that the shift in data centers to a hybrid model encompassing physical, virtual and cloud environments creates a huge opportunity for the software vendor, and he believes that the execution of its strategy will determine its success.

Maturing cloud ecosystem
According to IDC’s Morris, cloud deployment among enterprises will move beyond “sandboxing” and into mainstream adoption by mid-2011.

He added that tools built to help companies migrate to the cloud platform are also “maturing” in tandem and many of these will be available in the “next 12 months”.

Article credit: ZDnet ]]> http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/ca-technologies-buys-its-way-into-cloud-fray/feed/ 0 http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/fujitsu-sales-suggest-the-market-is-turning/ http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/fujitsu-sales-suggest-the-market-is-turning/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:20:03 +0000 cloudtweaks http://www.cloudtweaks.com/?p=2198

News that Fujitsu UK & Ireland has signed £200m in new business with three large customers will be seen as welcome relief to Fujitsu shareholders, among others.

While it will disappoint the companies that lost to Fujitsu, they will nevertheless be encouraged that the private sector is once again spending money. After keeping their hands in their pockets for the past 30 months, customers now seem more open to suggestion.
Fujitsu UK CEO Roger Gilbert detects a new note in discussions these days. IT is a boardroom topic, especially when it comes to mergers and demergers, he says. And where the CEO has plans, IT is beginning to figure prominently in his or her calculations, he says.
Customers are coming back to the market to find a different set of conditions compared to when they last were here. Thirty months is almost two generations of silicon life, so, following Moore’s Law, they are getting about four times more processing power for the same pound.
They are also seeing a tectonic shift towards “cloud computing”, however that is defined. That is putting a greater emphasis on the capacity and reliability o of the networks to bring it all together.
While there are clearly growing capacity issues in the public networks, bandwidth, access and cost are all moving in favour of customers. Many customers think their own internal leased networks will make them immune from such considerations. They are wrong. The rise of social networks and growing willingness of consumers to use networks to interact with companies means that no company can afford to ignore the constraints imposed by congestion in the public networks.
Responsible companies should be adding their voices to the debate over Broadband Britain to ensure that their customers have fast, cheap reliable access to them, wherever they may be.

Source: ComputerWeekly ]]> http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/fujitsu-sales-suggest-the-market-is-turning/feed/ 0 http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/vmworld%c2%ae-2010-the-leading-virtualization-event-of-the-year-comes-to-san-francisco-and-copenhagen-this-year-educating-attendees-on-the-virtual-road-to-cloud-computing/ http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/vmworld%c2%ae-2010-the-leading-virtualization-event-of-the-year-comes-to-san-francisco-and-copenhagen-this-year-educating-attendees-on-the-virtual-road-to-cloud-computing/#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:55:29 +0000 cloudtweaks http://www.cloudtweaks.com/?p=2191

Whitepaper and Webcast Detail How Companies Can Manage the Performance and Availability of Applications in the Cloud

DETROIT, Jul 27, 2010 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) — Compuware Corporation /quotes/comstock/15*!cpwr/quotes/nls/cpwr (CPWR 8.20, -0.06, -0.73%) has published a new whitepaper titled: “Performance in the Cloud.” The paper examines how companies can manage the performance and availability of applications in the cloud by using real-time data to monitor cloud service providers. An on-demand webcast on performance in the cloud is also available at: http://bit.ly/cn5P26.

Cloud Computing is driving a fundamental shift in the way organizations build, deploy and use applications, and it’s raising expectations on how quickly and cost-effectively new IT functionality can be made available to the business. And even though the delivery chain for these “borderless applications” now crosses organizational and geographic boundaries, users will still expect the applications to perform well, and they will hold IT accountable if they don’t. IT is faced with managing an increasingly complex and diverse delivery chain, consisting of dozens of service and content providers spread around the world.

The challenge for IT is to meet the business expectation of faster delivery of new functionality, while at the same time maintaining end-to-end visibility and control of application performance and availability across an inter-dependent, but independent, network of service providers.

This Compuware whitepaper and on-demand webcast provide real-world insight into how companies are successfully addressing this challenge, and how they can get objective, real-time data on the performance and availability of their prospective cloud service providers to assist them in their decision-making process.

Together, Compuware Vantage and Gomez deliver the market’s only application performance management solution that provides broad visibility and deep-dive resolution across the entire application delivery chain, spanning both the Enterprise and the Internet. These unrivaled capabilities make Compuware the global standard for optimizing application performance.

Follow us on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/compuware and http://twitter.com/Gomez_Inc.

Compuware Corporation

Founded in 1973, Compuware provides software, experts and best practices to ensure applications work well and deliver business value. Compuware solutions optimize end-to-end application performance for leading organizations around the world, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites. Learn more at: http://www.compuware.com.

The Compuware logo is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=5950

This news release was distributed by GlobeNewswire, www.globenewswire.com

SOURCE: Compuware