Posts tagged Infrastructure-as-a
Investment Implications Of Cloud Computing – CloudTweaks
Mar 26th
The impact of cloud computing on the enterprise computing landscape is reminiscent of the shift from big mainframe systems to client server computing in the ’90s. A step change in the economics of computing is driving this transformation and creating opportunities for new providers, while threatening the established business models of traditional application software and data center technology vendors.
Established vendors such as:
Microsoft (MSFT : 30.01, 0.36),
SAP (SAP : 46.99, 0.01),
Cisco (CSCO : 26.44, 0),
IBM (IBM : 129.27, 0.69),
HP (HPQ : 53.5, 0.42),
Dell (DELL : 14.93, -0.07),
EMC (EMC : 18.73, -0.11), and
NetApp (NTAP : 32.66, -0.52)
could face significant headwinds as public cloud computing gains customer acceptance.
The Public Cloud
Cloud computing has evolved into a broad term encompassing all manner of remotely delivered computing resources and services. Broadly speaking, uniform IT services provided remotely to multiple customers from third-party controlled data centers have been christened the “public cloud.”
The public cloud generally features large scale data centers comprised of commodity hardware orchestrated by custom management software. There is a wide variety of public cloud services, but most share the following attributes:
- Utility Model: Customers pay for public cloud computing services on a subscription or metered basis, replacing fixed up-front IT capital expenditures with variable operating expenses.
- Elastic Resources: Customers can access additional cloud computing capacity as needed, thereby eliminating the need to permanently provision capacity for peak demand.
- Shared Resources: Users share computing resources with other customers using virtual rather than physical data and processing partitions.
For the purpose of this discussion, we segment the public cloud market based on the tier of service provided, with each tier sharing certain economic characteristics. A conceptual representation of the service tiers is shown below. Computing infrastructure (servers, storage, networking) forms the physical foundation on which software platforms (application runtime environments, databases) are installed. End-user applications such as customer relationship management software are built and deployed on the software platform. Public cloud customers can lease capacity at any tier: software applications (software-as-a-service), software platform (platform-as-a-service), or raw infrastructure (infrastructure-as-a-service).
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
SaaS has the longest track record among cloud services and growth remains strong, but barriers to entry are lower than traditional on-premise application software. SaaS involves software applications running in remote data centers accessed by customers over the Internet. In its most scalable form, vendors employ a multitenant approach where the same basic software is shared by multiple customers, with some opportunity for customization. Customers benefit from the subscription model as well as ease of adoption and management–accessing a new SaaS service can be as easy as pointing a web browser to a specific web address. The list of SaaS vendors is very long and growing by the day, but prominent examples include Salesforce.com (CRM 
: 75.98, -0.2) and NetSuite (N : 14.18, 0.03).
The constrained customizability of multi-tenant SaaS has limited its usage to best-practices based applications such as customer relationship management, financial accounting, and human resource management. Although we expect greater flexibility as technology advances, we think near-term growth in SaaS is likely to come from within the realm of such standardized services. That said, vendors such as SAP and NetSuite are attempting to deliver more complex business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the SaaS model. We think such efforts are unlikely to make inroads with large enterprises in the foreseeable future, but could suit the needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) that do not have the IT staff or the capital budget for traditionally expensive business application software.
The ease of adoption of SaaS applications is also the Achilles heel in vendors’ ability to generate significant economic profit. With little customer investment in equipment, software license fees, customization and training of support staff, switching SaaS providers can be as easy as transferring data to a new vendor and changing the mailing name and address on the subscription check. However, end user re-training requirements still serve as a barrier, and the stickiness of SaaS applications increases with the number of customers’ employees using the service. Acknowledging this, salesforce automation (SFA) vendor Salesforce.com has made a concerted effort to expand beyond its footprint in customers’ sales organizations by adding a social networking service (Chatter Cloud) that the company hopes will increase the user base, and thus the stickiness, of its services. The firm is also investing in the development of adjacent business applications on its platform, with the expectation that a classic suite approach would naturally increase the stickiness and profitability of its service.
The relatively lower stickiness of SaaS implies lower profitability and returns on capital than that historically delivered by companies like Oracle (ORCL : 25.75, 0) and Microsoft. Full Source
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11 Top Open-source Resources for Cloud Computing
Jan 11th
I found this article over at: GigaOM its a couple of months old but is a nice compilation list.
Open-source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing. Cloud deployments can save money, free businesses from vendor lock-ins that could really sting over time, and offer flexible ways to combine public and private applications. The following are 11 top open-source cloud applications, services, educational resources, support options, general items of interest, and more.
Eucalyptus. Ostatic broke the news about UC Santa Barbara’s open-source cloud project last year. Released as an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, Eucalyptus directly uses the Amazon command-line tools. Startup Eucalyptus Systems was launched this year with venture funding, and the staff includes original architects from the Eucalyptus project. The company recently released its first major update to the software framework, which is also powering the cloud computing features in the new version of Ubuntu Linux.
Red Hat’s Cloud. Linux-focused open-source player Red Hat has been rapidly expanding its focus on cloud computing. At the end of July, Red Hat held its Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, which included a large number of presentations from movers and shakers focused on open-source cloud initiatives. You can find free webcasts for all the presentations here. The speakers include Rich Wolski (CTO of Eucalyptus Systems), Brian Stevens (CTO of Red Hat), and Mike Olson (CEO of Cloudera). Stevens’ webcast can bring you up to speed on Red Hat’s cloud strategy. Novell is also an open source-focused company that is increasingly focused on cloud computing, and you can read about its strategy here.
Traffic Server. Yahoo this week moved its open-source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own traffic, and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing software stacks. Acting as an overlay to raw cloud computing services, Traffic Server allows IT administrators to allocate resources, including handling thousands of virtualized services concurrently.
Cloudera. The open-source Hadoop software framework is increasingly used in cloud computing deployments due to its flexibility with cluster-based, data-intensive queries and other tasks. It’s overseen by the Apache Software Foundation, and Yahoo has its own time-tested Hadoop distribution. Cloudera is a promising startup focused on providing commercial support for Hadoop. You can read much more about Cloudera here.
Puppet. Virtual servers are on the rise in cloud computing deployments, and Reductive Labs’ open-source software, built upon the legacy of the Cfengine system, is hugely respected by many system administrators for managing them. You can use it to manage large numbers of systems or virtual machines through automated routines, without having to do a lot of complex scripting.
Enomaly. The company’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) has its roots in widely used Enomalism open-source provisioning and management software, designed to take much of the complexity out of starting a cloud infrastructure. ECP is a programmable virtual cloud computing infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses, and you can read much more about it here.
Joyent. In January of this year, Joyent purchased Reasonably Smart, a fledgling open-source cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git. Joyent’s cloud hosting infrastructure and cloud management software incorporate many open-source tools for public and private clouds. The company can also help you optimize a speedy implementation of the open-source MySQL database for cloud use.
Zoho. Many people use Zoho’s huge suite of free, online applications, which is competitive with Google Docs. What lots of folks don’t realize, though, is that Zoho’s core is completely open source — a shining example of how SaaS solutions can work in harmony with open source. You can find many details on how Zoho deploys open-source tools in this interview.
Globus Nimbus. This open-source toolkit allows businesses to turn clusters into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. The Amazon EC2 interface is carried over, but is not the only interface you can choose.
Reservoir. This is the main European research initiative on virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. It’s a far-reaching project targeted to develop open-source technology for cloud computing, and help businesses avoid vendor lock-in.
OpenNebula. The OpenNebula VM Manager is a core component of Reservoir. It’s an open-source answer to the many virtual machine management offerings from proprietary players, and interfaces easily with cloud infrastructure tools and services. “OpenNebula is an open-source virtual infrastructure engine that enables the dynamic deployment and re-placement of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources,” according to project leads.
It’s good to see open-source tools and resources competing in the cloud computing space. The end result should be more flexibility for organizations that want to customize their approaches. Open-source cloud offerings also have the potential to keep pricing for all competitive services on a level playing field.
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Taiwan’s cloud computing market to reach NT$6.21 billion in 2010
Nov 24th
Taipei, Nov.24 (CNA) Taiwan’s “cloud computing” services market is estimated to reach NT$5.56 billion (US$172 million) for 2009, up 12.8 percent from last year, and to hit NT$6.21 billion in 2010, a well-known market research institute said Tuesday.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS), which provides co-location and security operation center services, will occupy the bulk of the cloud computing market for 2009 with an amount of NT$5.07 billion, according to the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC).
Meanwhile, the Software-as-a-Service(SaaS), which provides online software solutions such as Salesforce.com CRM and Cisco WebEx, will account for NT$487 million of the cloud computing market in 2009, the MIC said.
Lin Hsin-heng, an industry analyst at MIC, said that nearly 35 percent of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Taiwan are using cloud computing services.
Citing the results of an MIC survey that was conducted between Nov. 2008 and Jan. 2009, Lin said most SMEs use cloud computing because of its flexibility in terms of deployment and low investment risks.
Lin said that companies with fewer information technology engineers tend to employ more cloud computing services.
Cloud computing is a Web-enabled software solution that uses the Internet as a platform for performing tasks on the computer and delivers a range of inter-operable applications.
