Posts tagged server
Cloud Web Hosting Services Powered by Amazon EC2
Aug 3rd
Web host SiteCloud.com (www.sitecloud.com) is entering the cloud hosting market with its proprietary cloud hosting platform built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud, and featuring cPanel/WHM.
SiteCloud advertises twelve packages scaled within the cloud hosting architecture for the equivalent of shared, virtual private servers, dedicated hosting and reseller hosting services.
According to SiteCloud’s Monday announcement, its cloud hosting packages provides added flexibility for growing businesses.
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Gartner releases cloud computing ‘rights and responsibilities
Jul 14th
Analyst firm, Gartner, published a set of guidelines intended to ease relationships between cloud vendors and users. As cloud computing becomes more pervasive, the ecosystem (including vendors and analysts) is seeking ways to align expectations among relevant parties.
Gartner specified “six rights and one responsibility of service customers that will help providers and consumers establish and maintain successful business relationships:”
The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data - Service consumers should retain ownership of, and the rights to use, their own data.
The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes – All computing services – including cloud services – suffer slowdowns and failures. However, cloud services providers seldom commit to recovery times, specify the forms of remediation or spell out the procedures they will follow.
The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes – Every service provider will need to take down its systems, interrupt its services or make other changes in order to increase capacity and otherwise ensure that its infrastructure will serve consumers adequately in the long term. Protecting the consumer’s business processes entails providing advanced notification of major upgrades or system changes, and granting the consumer some control over when it makes the switch.
The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front – Most service providers do not fully explain their own systems, technical requirements and limitations so that after consumers have committed to a cloud service, they run the risk of not being able to adjust to major changes, at least not without a big investment.
The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates – If the cloud provider stores or transports the consumer’s data in or through a foreign country, the service consumer becomes subject to laws and regulations it may not know anything about.
The right to know what security processes the provider follows - With cloud computing, security breaches can happen at multiple levels of technology and use. Service consumers must understand the processes a provider uses, so that security at one level (such as the server) does not subvert security at another level (such as the network).
The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements - Providers and consumers must come to an understanding about how the proper use of software licenses will be assured.
Readers interested in this topic should also see enterprise analyst, Ray Wang’s, Software as a Service (SaaS) Customer’s Bill of Rights. That document describes a set of practices to ensure consumer protections across the entire SaaS lifecycle, as indicated in the following diagram:
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Akamai Appoints Chuck Neerdaels as Vice President of Engineering, Cloud Platforms
Jul 14th
Industry-renowned expert to lead Company’s focus on cloud optimization
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM), the leading provider of cloud optimization services, announced today the appointment of Chuck Neerdaels as Vice President of Engineering, Cloud Platforms. A pioneer in the field of Internet technologies, Mr. Neerdaels possesses nearly two decades of experience building Internet caching, streaming, storage and content acceleration solutions. Neerdaels re-joins Akamai having most recently served as a vice president in the cloud computing group at Yahoo!. He will be based out of Akamai’s San Mateo, CA office, where he will lead the company’s Cloud Platforms engineering team.
Earlier in his career, Neerdaels held senior engineering roles at Netscape, Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo!) and Akamai, where he led the research and development of numerous product launches. Neerdaels is also one of the original authors of the federally-funded Harvest Information Discovery System, or “Harvest Project,” which evolved to become today’s popular Squid caching server.
“For over a decade, Akamai has helped companies leverage the power of the Internet by transforming it into a secure and reliable place for transacting business. Now, the same underlying technologies and solutions are needed to drive successful enterprise adoption of cloud computing,” said Harald Prokop, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Akamai. ”Chuck’s proven engineering expertise, combined with his reputation for innovation, makes him a tremendous asset to Akamai as we evolve our offerings in this dynamic and growing market.”
An alternative to centralized cloud infrastructure, Akamai’s cloud optimization services are built on top of an intelligent network of more than 65,000 servers distributed across 1,000 Internet service providers worldwide. This distributed network runs at the edge of the cloud, striving to transform the Internet into a high-performance platform where companies can confidently develop and deploy business-critical applications within a cloud computing environment.
“As more and more enterprises deploy applications on cloud platforms, the need for advanced optimization services has become critical to the success of their cloud initiatives,” says Neerdaels. ”I’m excited to be part of the Akamai team again and I look forward to leveraging my experience to advance Akamai’s mission of enabling enterprises around the world to pursue hybrid or full cloud strategies.”
Neerdaels received a B.A.E.M. in Aerospace Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota and completed extensive coursework toward a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California.
For more information about Akamai’s cloud optimization services please visit www.akamai.com/cloud.
About Akamai
Akamai® provides market-leading, cloud-based services for optimizing Web and mobile content and applications, online HD video, and secure e-commerce. Combining highly-distributed, energy-efficient computing with intelligent software, Akamai’s global platform is transforming the cloud into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, transact and collaborate. To learn how the world’s leading enterprises are optimizing their business in the cloud, please visit www.akamai.com and follow @Akamai on Twitter.
Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai Technologies, Inc.’s management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by hackers or others, failure of our cloud-based services to perform as expected, and other factors that are discussed in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
| Contacts: | ||
| Liz Bradley | Noelle Faris | |
| Media Relations | Investor Relations | |
| 617-444-2938 | 617-444-4676 | |
| ebradley@akamai.com | nfaris@akamai.com |
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Cloud computing saves L.A. millions in IT costs
Jun 9th
Why did the City of Angels move to the cloud? Given that the Los Angeles city budget was constrained by the Great Recession, the driver was simple: cost savings. When the reality of a legacy IT infrastructure that couldn’t meet the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce was added to that driver, LA’s chief technology officer Randi Levin put out a request for proposal for the cloud.
“We’ve been cutting services,” she said. “We are now completely in what I would call ‘survival mode.’ Two or three years ago, we had a $116 million expense budget. Next year, it’ll be $80 million. It might even be less.”
After due diligence, Levin said her team recommended that the City of Los Angeles implement Google. “We predicted — and are on track — to save about $5 million over the next three years,” said Levin. “Those are hard dollar savings.”
Levin is looking ahead to where she can best use her staff. What are the important tasks? “It’s not running servers,” said Levin. “The city will get much more bang for their buck if we’re developing applications and websites, or making processes more efficient. As a general rule, we’re going to start moving out of that business and letting somebody else do it who can do it more efficiently.”
Read the Rest at: O’Reilly Radar
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Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free
May 27th
The last time the IT industry delivered outsourced shared-resource computing to the enterprise was with timesharing in the 1980s when it evolved to a high art, delivering the reliability, performance, and service the enterprise demanded. Today, cloud computing is poised to address the needs of the same market, based on a revolution of new technologies, significant unused computing capacity in corporate data centers, and the development of a highly capable Internet data communications infrastructure. The economies of scale of delivering computing from a centralized, shared infrastructure have set the expectation among customers that cloud computing costs will be significantly lower than those incurred from providing their own computing. Together with the reduced deployment costs of open source software and the perfect competition characteristics of remote computing, these expectations set the stage for fierce pressure on cloud providers to continuously lower prices.
This pricing pressure results in a commoditization of cloud services that deemphasizes enterprise requirements such as guaranteed levels of performance, uptime, and vendor responsiveness, much as has been the case with the Web hosting industry. Notwithstanding, it is the expectation of enterprise management that operating expenses be reduced through the use of cloud computing to replace new and existing IT infrastructure. This difference between expectation and what the industry can deliver at today’s nearzero price points represents a challenge, both technical and organizational, which will have to be overcome to ensure large-scale adoption of cloud computing by the enterprise.
The Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing
This is where we come full circle and timesharing is reborn. The same forces are at work that made timesharing a viable option 30 years ago: the high cost of computing (far exceeding the cost of the physical systems), and the highly specialized labor needed to keep it running well. The essential characteristics of cloud computing that address these needs are:4
- On-demand access. Rapid fulfillment of demand for computing and continuing ability to fulfill that demand as required.
- Elasticity. Computing is provided in the amount required and disposed of when no longer needed.
- Pay-per-use. Much like a utility, cloud resource charges are based on the quantity used.
- Connectivity. All of the servers are connected to a high-speed network that allows data to flow to the Internet as well as between computing and storage elements.
- Resource pooling. The cloud provider’s infrastructure is shared across some number of end customers, providing economies of scale at the computing and services layers
- Abstracted infrastructure. The cloud end customer does not know the exact location or the type of computer(s) their applications are running on. Instead, the cloud provider provides performance metrics to guarantee a minimum performance level.
- Little or no commitment. This is an important aspect of today’s cloud computing offerings, but as we will see here, interferes with delivery of the services the enterprise demands.
Continue… Credit to: Communications of the ACM
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Before You Choose a Cloud Computing Vendor: 8 Questions
Apr 30th
Other vendors don’t offer the right kind of security — the kind a CIO gets from knowing that new cloud provider is a partner to be relied on, not one that will disappear or fail after the CIO talked a large portion of the company into relying on it.
Faced with a project list greater than his budget, MoMA’s Peltzman looked into various cloud services as ways to extend MoMA’s capacity in specific ways at specific times. Broad-spectrum IaaS services such as Amazon’s EC3 had plenty of capacity, but the startup took too long, he says. SaaS providers such as Salesforce.com’s online ERP were too function-specific, he adds. Instead, he picked a service from Cloudshare that allowed him to create virtual workgroup environments at will, on Cloudshare’s network.
How to Negotiate a Better Cloud Computing Contract
How do you find the right cloud provider? There’s not a consistent checklist either small or large companies can go through to make the selection, according to Bernard Golden, CEO of cloud consulting firm HyperStratus and CIO.com blogger.
“A manufacturing company isn’t going to have the same checklist as a service company or retailer,” Golden says. “They’re too different. But there is a consistent set of things to look at. Some of them are specific to cloud providers; a lot of them are the same kinds of things you had to look at in outsourcing or any other service provider contract.”
1. How responsive is the cloud company?
“How fast do they call you back?” asks James McKee, president of United Resource Systems, medical-debt collection company based in Lakewood, Colo. “It doesn’t tell you everything, but I like to know how important I am to them and how responsive they are. My clients demand that responsiveness from me; I demand it from my providers.”
Some providers may be more responsive at the beginning of a relationship than later, so checking with other customers on that point is important as well, Golden says.
CIO — There are few ways a CIO can look better than by walking in to the CEO’s office to offer a sophisticated technology service that answers a desperate business need without requiring large capital expenses or delays before implementation.
“Flip the switch and there’s the extra capacity. Pay for what you use and shut it off again,” says Steven Peltzman, CIO of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Not every cloud provider can do that, of course. Some don’t offer the right kind of service. Infrastructure as a service providers such as Amazon Web Services require too much work up front to suit a relatively small IT project.
2. How transparent is the cloud service?
“There’s a lot of mystery in clouds,” according to Chris Wolf, analyst with the Burton Group. There’s no need to understand the underlying infrastructure and the company’s plans to upgrade or reinforce it if you’re just using Google (GOOG) for Gmail. But any company hiring a provider for important business functions deserves to know what kind of technology — and secondary or tertiary service providers — actually makes up the cloud and how reliable it is.
3. How prepared is the cloud provider to answer due-diligence questions?
Some of the most critical questions are the most basic: what does the company do to ensure physical security; what servers and software does it run and what are its arrangements for disaster recovery; are its employees all well trained, background-checked, bonded and secured?
“All the basic stuff is pretty important, but you have to verify that,” Wolf says. “You have to know they’re relatively stable and reliable in hiring and you have to check on things like making sure they have redundant telecom arrangements and high availability/DR options so you don’t go down for three days when they have a power outage.”
4. How much access does the cloud provider offer?
“You should be able to go through your list of criteria with the vendor and get answers to your questions and have them revisit that periodically to demonstrate how they’re living up to your expectations,” Golden says. “If it’s a big contract, you’re going to want to do audits periodically to verify SLA and compliance and security issues.”
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VMware, Salesforce.com to offer in-cloud Java – Cloud Computing
Apr 27th
Two relatively new arrivals in the computing industry announced a partnership to profit from the trend toward general-purpose cloud computing services on the Net.
The first partner is VMware, an EMC subsidiary that specializes in virtualization technology that lets multiple operating systems run simultaneously on the same computer for greater operational flexibility. The second is Salesforce.com, a company that offers its clients customer-relationship management services online. Under the partnership, the two will offer a cloud-based service called VMforce for running Java applications.
Specifically, VMforce will permit programs written with VMware’s SpringSource tools and technology to run on tc Server, a version of the Apache Tomcat project for running Java programs on servers. VMforce will be available in a developer preview form later in 2010, at which point pricing will be announced, the companies said.
The service is an example of one variety of cloud computing, a general-purpose foundation customers can use to run their own programs. Previously, Salesforce.com had offered a Java-like language called Apex for such services.
Among competitors for the service are Google’s App Engine, which now can run Java programs, and Microsoft’s Azure, which are cloud-based Windows servers on which customers can run their own programs.
Another major variety of cloud computing operates at a higher applications level, with examples being Salesforce.com’s pre-built CRM service or Google Docs. And a third variety makes low-level computing resources available over the Net, the prime example being Amazon Web Services.
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Cloud Computing: It’s the Economics Stupid
Apr 23rd
Cloud’s ability to make IT more agile is undeniable, says CIO.com’s Bernard Golden. But once that benchmark is met, the cost effectiveness of the internal cloud versus public providers will be a key measure of success.
CIO — The question of costs associated with cloud computing continue to be controversial. You may recognize in this blog’s title, an homage to the motto of Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential campaign: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” The motto referred to the decision by the Clinton campaign to focus relentlessly on how the U.S. economy was doing in 1992, sidestepping other issues and always, always circling back to the economic outlook for the US. I was reminded of this by some recent discussions on Twitter that discussed the importance of economics in terms of cloud adoption.
This question of cloud economics arises especially in the context of the endless discussions about private vs. public clouds (private usually being thought of as referring to a cloud environment inside a company’s own data center). Some people assert that private clouds obviously must be less expensive, because one owns the equipment and is not paying what is, in effect, a rental fee. The obvious analogy is buying a car vs. renting a car. If one uses a car every day, it’s clearly less expensive to own rather than pay a daily rental fee to, say, Hertz. Sometimes this argument is made stronger by noting that public cloud providers also are profit-seeking enterprises, so an extra tranche of end-user cost is present, representing the profit margin of the public offering.
The proponents of public cloud computing cost advantages point to the economies of scale large providers realize. At a recent “AWS in the Enterprise” event, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, noted that Amazon buys “10s of racks of servers at a time” and gets big discounts because of this. Also, AWS buys custom-designed equipment that leave out unneeded, power-using features like USB ports. Moreover, the public cloud providers implement operations automation to an extreme degree and thereby drop the labor cost factor in their clouds.
