Posts tagged computing resources
Eucalyptus 2.0 Major New Version of its Open Source Private Cloud Platform
Aug 25th
Delivers High Scalability and Flexibility for Private Cloud Computing
Santa Barbara, Calif. (PRWEB) August 25, 2010
Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creators of the leading open source private cloud platform, today announced a major update of the open source Eucalyptus software. Eucalyptus 2.0 features increased scalability to support massive private and hybrid clouds as well as enhanced performance tuning and 
flexibility in deploying Eucalyptus without modification on existing IT infrastructure. Eucalyptus 2.0 is available immediately under the open source GPL license and can be downloaded at http://open.eucalyptus.com.
“Eucalyptus software is evolving rapidly to support private and hybrid clouds in a range of sizes and configurations,” said Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus Systems CEO. “Along with many new usability enhancements, Eucalyptus 2.0 today meets the scaling requirements of enterprise data centers and cloud service providers. We continue to benefit from our early lead in the market as we work closely with the open source community, customers and partners in perfecting our offering.”
Eucalyptus is infrastructure software that enables organizations to deploy scalable private and hybrid cloud computing environments within a secure IT infrastructure. With Eucalyptus, customers can make more efficient use of their computing resources, increase productivity, and deploy new applications faster, while protecting sensitive data and reducing capital expenditures. Eucalyptus supports the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.
Eucalyptus 2.0 Delivers High Scalability, Flexibility & Performance Tuning
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Nimbula raises $15M to expand cloud service
Aug 24th
Reuters Press Release
Nimbula, a provider of cloud-computing services, raised an additional $15 million in venture capital funding in a second round led by Accel Partners on Monday. It plans to use the money to promote market adoption of its on-demand computing service.
Accel Partners snagged a spot on the company’s board of directors, which will be filled by the Accel partner Ping Li, a cloud-computing specialist who has also backed Cloudera and BitTorrent, among others.
The company bills itself as a provider of a more private and customizable version of online retailer Amazon.com’s on-demand service, which charges users hourly rates to rent computing resources via the Internet. Amazon.com’s service, called the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2, was also developed by Nimbula cofounders Chris Pinkham and Willem van Bijon.
Nimbula’s launch was formally unveiled at Structure, a cloud-computing conference held in San Francisco, in June after it raised $5.75 million from Sequoia Capital. Sequoia also participated in Nimbula’s second round.
The cloud service provider joins several others that have also secured venture capital funding recently, including Eucalyptus and Makara.
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Deciphering Red Hat’s cloud computing strategy
Aug 7th
Of the three primary Linux vendors (Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat), Canonical and Red Hat have made the biggest splashes in the cloud computing market. Canonical’s focus appears to be simple partnerships and bundling software, rather than the comprehensive enterprise products offered by Red Hat. At its 2010 Summit, Red Hat provided a complete and separate track of cloud sessions that introduced its family of cloud products and services, along with its cloud strategy. While Red Hat provides an abundance of information about its cloud offerings, it’s not always clear how they fit together.
The overarching strategy behind Red Hat’s cloud offerings is to provide a consistent environment that allows you to run your workloads in your enterprise data center (fully or partially virtualized, with or without a private cloud) or in a public cloud. This consistency extends all the way through licensing.
For example, if you exhaust capacity in your data center, Red Hat software, specifically MRG Grid, can automatically schedule workloads on virtual machines in the Amazon public cloud. Of course, you get to specify which workloads that you are willing to allow to be run outside your data center. MRG Grid is designed to schedule various types of computing resources, including virtual machines across private and public clouds.
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Skytap
Jul 30th
Skytap provides cloud automation solutions for enterprises and software vendors to develop, test, train, demo, and migrate new and existing applications in the cloud. Skytap is ideal for dynamic workloads that require scalable and secure computing resources on-demand. With Skytap users are empowered to create cloud based virtual data centers instantly using a self-service UI, run applications without code changes and collaborate globally. Meanwhile, IT can get complete visibility and control over cloud deployments, enforce security and usage policies, and reduce costs by 70% with a pay as you go model.
Learn more about Skytap’s cloud-based development and test, training, customer demo, virtual private cloud and IT sandbox solutions by visiting www.skytap.com
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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Jul 30th
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.
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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.
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Cloud Computing: Two Kinds of Agility
Jul 16th
A Nice Article by: Bernard Golden with CIO
CIO — A key benefit often discussed about cloud computing is how it enables agility. This benefit is real and powerful. However, the term agility is used to describe two different kinds of benefit; both are real, but one of them will, ultimately, be seen as offering the greatest impact. This post will discuss the two types of agility and provide some examples of how compelling the second type is.
What does cloud agility mean? It’s tied to the rapid provisioning of computer resources. Cloud environments can usually provide new compute instances or storage in minutes, a far cry from the very common weeks (or months, in some organizations) the same provisioning process can take in typical IT shops.
As one could imagine, the dramatic shortening of the provisioning timeframe enables work to commence much more quickly. No more submitting a request for computing resources and then anxiously watching e-mail for a fulfillment response. As agility may be defined as “the power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness” it’s easy to see how this rapid provisioning is referred to advancing agility.
But here is where the definition gets a bit muddled. People conflate two different things under the term agility: engineering resource availability, and business response to changing conditions or opportunity.
Both types of agility are useful, but the latter type will ultimately prove to be the more compelling and will come to be seen as the real agility associated with cloud computing.
The problem with delivering compute resources to engineers more quickly is it is a local optimization — it makes a portion of internal IT processes more agile, but doesn’t necessarily shorten the overall application supply chain, which stretches from initial prototype to production rollout.
In fact, it’s all too common for cloud agility to enable developers and QA to get started on their work more quickly, but for the overall delivery time to remain completely unchanged, stretched by slow handover to operations, extended shakedown time in the new production environment, and poor coordination with release to the business units.
Moreover, if cloud computing comes to be seen as an internal IT optimization with little effect on how quickly compute capability rolls out into mainline business processes, the potential exists for IT to never receive the business unit support it requires to fund the shift to cloud computing. It may be that cloud computing will end up like virtualization, which in many organizations is stuck at 20 percent or 30 percent penetration, unable to garner the funding necessary to support wider implementation. If the move to cloud computing is presented as “helps our programmers program faster,” necessary funding will probably never materialize.
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Cisco Live Snapshot: Cloud Computing Adoption Surges Ahead
Jun 30th
Cloud Benefits Clear Despite Debate Over Definitions Shows Network Instruments Onsite Survey
LAS VEGAS, June 30 /PRNewswire/ — According to a survey conducted during Cisco Live, 71 percent of organizations have implemented some form of cloud computing, despite an unclear understanding as to the actual definition of the technology. From the exhibition floor, Network Instruments polled 184 network engineers, managers, and directors and found:
Widespread Cloud Adoption: Of the 71 percent having adopted cloud computing solutions, half of these respondents deployed some form of private cloud. Forty-six percent implemented some form of Software as a Service (SaaS), such as SalesForce.com or Google Apps. Thirty-two percent utilize Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. A smaller number (16 percent) rely on some form of Platform as a Service (PaaS), such as Microsoft Azure and SalesForce.com’s Force.
Meaning of the Cloud Debatable: The term “cloud computing” meant different things to respondents. To the majority, it meant any IT services accessed via public Internet (46 percent). For other respondents, the term referred to computer resources and storage that can be accessed on-demand (34 percent). A smaller number of respondents stated cloud computing pertained to the outsourcing of hosting and management of computing resources to third-party providers (30 percent).
Real Gains Realized: The survey asked those who had implemented cloud computing to discuss how performance had changed after implementation. Sixty-four percent reported that application availability improved. The second area of improvement reported was a reduction in the costs of managing IT infrastructure (48 percent).
Technology Trouble Spots: While several respondents indicated their organizations saw definite gains from the technology, others observed network performance stayed the same or declined. Sixty-five percent indicated that security of corporate data declined or remained the same, compared to 35 percent that saw security improvements. With regards to troubleshooting performance problems, 61 percent reported no change or faced increased difficulty in detecting and solving problems.
“With proper planning and tools to ensure visibility from the user to the cloud provider, Cisco Live attendees are successfully deploying cloud services,” said Brad Reinboldt, product marketing manager at Network Instruments. “I was a bit surprised by the number of companies lacking tools to detect and troubleshoot cloud performance issues, as they risk running into significant problems that jeopardize any cost savings they may have initially gained.”
About Network Instruments:
Network Instruments, a leading provider of performance management and troubleshooting for fifteen years, helps organizations ensure the delivery of business-critical applications. The company’s platform of management and reporting products provides comprehensive visibility into networks and applications to optimize performance, speed troubleshooting, and assist long-term capacity planning. Network Instruments achieved profitability in its first quarter and posted revenue growth every year since its founding — without any external funding. Headquartered in Minneapolis, the company has sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries. For more information, please visit www.networkinstruments.com.
SOURCE Network Instruments
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How public sector IT organizations can tap into the power of the cloud
Jun 21st
How can you turn cloud computing from a mere concept to one that is a reality in your IT organization, bringing real value to both internal stakeholders and external constituents? Quite simply: With the right approach and the right tools. Now’s the time to tap into the cloud to exploit the potential economies of scale and achieve cost savings.
Cloud computing enables your IT organization to focus on the best and most cost-effective way to deliver services. It allows your internal customers to focus on what matters most: their core business requirements, such as a new public information portal or an online forum to publicize requests for proposals. Rather than providing IT with details about how many servers with so much CPU and RAM are needed, your internal customers can leverage the cloud to request capacity to perform specific services. And IT can offer services from a dynamic resource pool. As resource needs fluctuate, you have the flexibility to choose the best solution with the available resources. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Why Leverage the Cloud?
For public sector organizations, there are benefits to pursuing a cloud initiative, through private, community, or public cloud services. Though the private cloud is the most obvious option for government organization, the community cloud model has become an especially powerful idea for the public sector. Multiple agencies with similar concerns and requirements can create an environment that serves overlapping agency needs. This is especially relevant in the current climate of lower budgets and information-sharing requirements at both the federal and state levels. The community cloud provides many benefits of public cloud services without the security concerns. This model stands or falls based on the power of dynamic resource allocation. As the size of the community grows, the economies of scale are more and more compelling. With the right networks in place, the community cloud provides a pool of location-independent resources that can be leveraged equally, as needed, by the participating organizations (e.g. the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Rapid Access Computing Environment).
Public cloud services can be used to provide overflow capacity or a fully hosted environment (e.g., the U.S. General Services Administration’s USA.gov Web site) for those government services with less-stringent security requirements. For example, a government agency might anticipate much higher usage of a service during a short period of time (e.g., tax season, natural disasters), and with the proper integrations in place, Internet traffic could easily be load-balanced between the public and private cloud to quickly increase capacity, all without incurring any long-term costs.
Getting Started
