Posts tagged infrastructure provider
The top 5 mistakes cloud vendors make — and you should watch for
Jul 15th
The cloud computing market is overheated, and many cloud providers are making some very avoidable blunders
As the cloud computing market continues to heat up, I’m seeing some very profound mistakes made by both established and emerging cloud computing providers. Watch out for these blunders as you explore possible cloud providers.
Cloud computing mistake No. 1: Not focusing on the APIs
Whether the vendor is providing applications, infrastructure, or platforms, their clouds need to provide API access. APIs should be required for everything from accessing a credit report, such as for a CRM provider, to provisioning a virtual server, such as for an infrastructure provider. Even social networking providers, such as Twitter and Facebook, provide exceptional APIs — and that’s typically the way we interact with them.
Unfortunately, APIs are often an afterthought, and they exist as a subset of features the cloud provider offers — or not at all. In the future, cloud providers will be defined by their APIs, so they’d better get good at them.
Cloud computing mistake No. 2: No integration strategy
The fact of the matter is that companies won’t place their data in the cloud if there is no clear way to sync it back to on-premise systems. Cloud providers should not offer consulting engagements when you say the “bad” word “integration.” Instead, they should offer you a predefined strategy and sets of technologies. That means having partnerships with the right technology vendors and a clear map for how to synchronize data from on-premise to cloud as well as from cloud to cloud.
Cloud computing mistake No. 3: Outage defensiveness
IT systems go down from time to time, and cloud computing providers are no exception. However, there seems to be a quick circling of the wagons when an outage occurs and no admission of the facts behind the issue, nor approaches to avoid the problem in the future. Providers shouldn’t spin their mistakes. Instead, they should admit to them and learn from them. We’ll understand.
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Hybrid Clouds Hit Data Centers
Mar 9th
Merging public and private cloud computing infrastructures.
Charlotte Dunlap 
There was much buzz about merging public and private cloud infrastructures at last week’s RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. As enterprises use virtualization to step up the creation of private clouds around their data centers, security vendors are working to steer customers toward merging private and public clouds for a hybrid cloud approach.
Some security and infrastructure providers realize that private clouds are an important first step toward increasingly moving customer workloads to public clouds as the technology and security catches up.
Private cloud infrastructures are necessary for companies that are regulated under compliance mandates, but CIOs see the value of being able to tap public cloud services for obvious reasons: lower total cost of ownership (TCO), simplified management and access to dynamic global threat intelligence, i.e., malware alerts. Of course, enterprises are still very concerned about the security, reliability and governance issues associated with public clouds, but CIOs are going to be hearing a lot more about hybrid or internal/external cloud options in coming months as a way to appease concerns.
An example of a hybrid cloud solution is the merging of an internally built or private cloud infrastructure with a security vendor’s public network of threat intelligence. Examples of global threat intelligence delivered through public cloud services include Trend Micro‘s Smart Protection Network and Cisco ( CSCO – news – people ) Ironport SenderBase Security Network.
Over the past year security vendors have focused their cloud messaging primarily around Software-as-a-Service offerings targeting specific pain points, such as secure messaging, namely anti-spam. CIOs should anticipate more vendor messaging focused around hybrid cloud computing, targeting those large enterprises–not to mention European customers–that are required under governance to keep company data within the folds of the private cloud infrastructure. Security service providers are acknowledging customers’ need to keep data in-house, but they’re also providing options to couple private with public infrastructures and allow customers to off-load more of the security burden.
Later this year Trend Micro has plans to expand its private cloud services to include new protocols, such as Web reputation. Trend Micro says it will create a private cloud within the public cloud to let customers store confidential data, a prospect which will likely be most attractive to Internet service providers. Keep Reading at Forbes
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List of Cloud Platforms, Providers, and Enablers 2010
Feb 25th
Here is another list of cloud players that we’ve come across…
Cloud computing infrastructure tech&solution provider:
- 3Tera – AppLogic grid OS used as cloud computing platform by service providers and enterprises
- Appistry – Cloud computing middleware - Enables easily scalable cloud computing in the enterprise.
- Cassatt – Cassatt Active Response platform enables administrators to set policies to power physical and virtual servers safely on and off and pool their computing resources.
- CloudHan - Cloud tech and infrastructure consultant, in China.
- CloudScale Networks – Cloud enabler. Currently in private ALPHA only
- Joyent – Cloud Infrastructure (Accelerators), and consulting for developers and enterprise.
- nScaled, Inc – Cloud related services such as Migrations, Deployment, Planning, Consulting
- Q-layer – provides software for data centers that enables cloud computing, support VSAN, VLAN, VPDC, currently support VMware ESX.
- Skytap – IaaS service optimized for QA, Training, Demo, and Ops Testing. Supports VMware, Xen hypervisors & Windows, Linux & Solaris OS guests.
- Webscale Solutions – IT Strategy and Consulting on Cloud computing. Specialize in ROI investigations of CC. a CC provider evaluation framework and Enterprise Cloud Roadmap development.
Cloud computing infrastructure provider:
- Agathon Group – Cloud provider. Services include highly available VPS, virtual private datacenters and ready-to-use LAMP stacks. Self-service ordering. Custom development and managed services available.
- Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2/S3 (Hardware-a-a-S & Cloud Storage)
- CohesiveFT – CohesiveFT Elastic Server Factory – Webservice for assembling full application stacks (contextualization, custom apps, middleware, on top of base configs) with deployment to many virtual and cloud environs.
- ElasticHosts – UK-based instant, on-demand servers in the cloud
- Flexiscale – Another instant provisioner of web servers with some advanced features like auto-scaling coming soon.
- GoGrid – instant, on-demand servers offering “control in the cloud”. Deploy Windows/Linux servers via web-interface in minutes
- GridLayer – Cloud Provider. A service by Layered Technologies that delivers Virtual Private Datacenters and virtual private servers from grids of commodity servers
- LayeredTechnologies - Cloud Provider. provider of on-demand hosting and cloud and utility computing solutions through its brand GridLayer
- ReliaCloud – Deployed within a robust and resilient virtualization environment and architected to maximize uptime and performance. Free benefits include high availability, load balancing, robust APIs, and persistent servers.
- Mosso – Rackspace’s cloud hosting service
- Newservers – Instant provisioning of web servers either Windows or Linux
- Plura Processing – On-demand infrastructure for high-performance computing
Cloud computing PaaS provider:
- Aptana Cloud – Elastic Elastic Application Cloud™ featuring fully stacked and integrated PHP app engines, Ajax/Jaxer app engines, and soon Ruby on Rails app engines — ready to use and ready to scale as you need it.
- Bungee Connect – Provides end to end tools and systems required to develop, deploy and host web applications (Platform as a Service)
- Coherence – Oracle Coherence Data Grid for EC2 and other cloud platforms
- Force.com – Salesforce.com’s application development platform (PaaS)
- GigaSpaces – middleware for the cloud, “cloudware”
- Google AppEngine – (PaaS)Now support python
- Heroku – Ruby on Rails in their Cloud
- Morph Labs – Fully managed, open, elastically-scalable, end-to-end deployment and delivery platform for Ruby on Rails and Java (Jetty, JRuby, Groovy and Grails) web applications. Leverages AWS, but completely abstracts details and complexities from developers.
- Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) – Platform as a Service (PaaS) from Intuit.
- Qrimp – An AJAX based PaaS
- RightScale – RightScale provides a platform and expertise that enable companies to create scalable web applications running on Amazon’s Web Services that are reliable, easy to manage, and cost less
- Stax – Java Platform as a Service
Cloud computing based service provider:
- CAM Solutions – Monitoring-as-a-Service(TM)
- CloudStatus- CloudEnabler. Real-time performance trending of cloud infrastructure (currently AWS).
- DATASiSAR – Cloud Computing technology based consulting & IT Services provider
- Kaavo‘s IMOD is an easy to use online application. Cloud Computing Made Easy.
- Microsoft Mesh
- Nasstar - SaaS provider. Business grade Hosted Desktop service, UK market leaders.
- Nirvanix – Cloud Storage
- TrustSaaS – uptime monitoring and alerting service (‘SaaS Weather Report’) for Software as a Service (SaaS) run by an independent third party.
- UtilityStatus - Utility Computing Platform for SaaS charged in elapsed CPU time running on EC2.
Semantic computing Cloud service provider:
- ThoughtExpress – Generic Enterprise Management Service based in semantics supported by semantic computing cloud to perform enterprise information processing to deliver: BPM, BI, enterprise modelling & semantic human interface without the need to program.
Cloud Security Consultants and Overlay Network Providers
- CohesiveFT – CohesiveFT’s VPN-Cubed products are virtual firewallls, switches, hubs, and routers that are used to build overlay networks in clouds, across clouds, and to connect enterprise data centers to public clouds.
Cloud End-Points:
- XPack - a dedicated cloud end-point from Moderro Technologies. A solid-state, power-saving, VESA mountable desktop appliance with custom desktop environment designed for web applications.
