Posts tagged servers
The Top 10 Cloud Computing Trends
Aug 19th
Cloud computing is the technology of today and tomorrow.
People, companies, businesses, and organizations are fast shifting to cloud computing from client-server model. It is very hard to guess what cloud 
computing will exactly look like in the future or how it will bring changes in IT. However, we can see some trends, IT and business world are setting in cloud computing.
Following are the top 10 trends observed in cloud-computing;
Building Private Clouds
Larger organizations and enterprises are building their own private computing cloud. IBM’s “Blue Cloud” is such an example. Microsoft introduced its private cloud just last month. Private clouds are huge datacenters possessing information and data of all types. They remove the security concerns about cloud computing.
Shift in IT skills of the Professionals
With the paradigm shift from client server model to the cloud computing model, IT workers will need new sets of skills. They won’t have to operate and maintain IT infrastructure, but now they will have to know how to extract and use the best information from computing clouds.
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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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Cloud computing provider RightScale – How the Cloud Industry is Scaling
Aug 5th
Cloud computing management provider RightScale updated its blog this morning with some impressive figures that point to company’s growth: its customers’ cloud computing usage has increased by 1000% in one year. While the post accompanies a press release, it would be a mistake to dismiss the numbers as just PR.
The increased usage reflects three trends:
- Customers are using more cloud servers
- Cloud servers are running for longer periods of time
- Customers are using larger servers
“We are amazed to see how much has changed in the past year, both in terms of the overall amount of cloud computing as well as the applications being deployed,” says Thorsten von Eicken, RightScale CTO. “For example, our customers’ average server runtime has increased 146 percent, and the number of servers running full time has increased 310 percent, which are indications of not only more production applications, but also increasing cloud stability. Our customers are also launching more powerful servers in support of more users, increasing amounts of data, and additional services offered.”
These numbers point to an increasing adoption of cloud technologies in enterprise organizations. But as RightScale note in its blog, it’s not simply the growth itself that’s interesting – it’s how and where the growth occurred. The move to larger instances, for example, seems to indicate that cloud adoption isn’t simply about horizontal scalability. And while new apps should be built with horizontal scalability in mind, many customers are opting instead to simply purchase a larger server instance so that scaling can happen vertically instead.
That servers are running for longer also indicates that it’s not simply development and testing that’s being done on the cloud. RightScale says that of the servers launched in June 2009, 3.3% still ran 30 days later. In June 2010, 6.3% were still running after a month. It’s a small percentage increase, perhaps, but it does indicate that more and more organizations are adopting the cloud for production, not just development.
The RightScale figures only reflect one company’s growth, but it’s an interesting glimpse nonetheless in how the industry itself is scaling.
Read the article at: ReadWriteWeb
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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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Federal government seeks bids for cloud computing services
Jun 28th
Local companies are hoping to help the federal government move into cloud — or Internet-based — computing, as the General Services Administration prepares to select approved vendors.
GSA has issued a request for quotes, open to companies on its information technology schedule, to provide the cloud infrastructure. After reviewing the bids — due June 30 — GSA will select contractors that federal agencies can then draw on for cloud services.
Through cloud computing, agencies can access a pool of Internet-based resources, such as networks, servers and applications, rather than invest in computing infrastructure. The technology can then be used on an as-needed basis, making it cheaper and quicker to set up.
“Cloud computing is inevitable, said David L. McClure, associate administrator for GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. “It’s the speed and pace and direction that we’re always uncertain of, but it’s an inevitable move because the computing industry itself is moving in this direction.”
Chantilly-based Apptis — which is partnering with Amazon Web Services — is among those companies that plan to compete.
“This is a very important program for the government because it addresses a couple things that have been inhibitors to cloud, the first being ease of procurement,” said Phil Horvitz, the company’s chief technology officer.
Additionally, he said, government concerns about security are addressed in the cloud requirements.
Falls Church-based CSC also plans to bid. In a statement, the company said it already has extensive experience in cloud projects of similar scope.
McClure said he expects federal agencies to use the selected vendors, but the agencies are not limited to buying cloud computing through this program.
“We’ve devised an acquisition vehicle that allows agencies to get access to these services in a very competitively priced environment and one that’s simplified, so we think it will be a win-win both for industry as well as for agencies,” he said. “We’re not trying to create only a one-stop shop for all of cloud computing; we’re just again evolving it out to illustrate to the rest of government that this is doable.”
Many information technology companies are looking into the cloud business, according to Deniece Peterson, industry analysis manager at Input, a firm that studies the government contracting market.
“I think that cloud computing is an area of interest even for companies that ultimately decide they can’t play in the space,” she said. “Everyone looks at it.”
Tim May, Apptis’s senior vice president for business development, said he expects cloud computing to play an increasing role in the government — and that the GSA program will help federal agencies become more comfortable with it.
“We’ve made the comparison to 1995 with the Internet. If you rewind 15 years, there was skepticism,” May said. “Now it’s used in financial transactions, it’s second nature.
Article Credit to: TheWashingtonPost
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10 things: Using Amazon Web Services in the enterprise
Jun 28th
Amazon Web Services recently held a powwow for potential enterprise customers and a bevy of details emerged ranging from contracts to security to procedures to ensure employees don’t procure a cloud servers en masse for giggles.
Here’s a reporter’s notebook from Amazon Web Services’ enterprise powwow and 10 things you may not have known:
- AWS customers mentioned that there were frequently three cloud platforms they evaluated leading up to a move to the cloud. Those players included AWS, Rackspace and Microsoft’s Azure. Marc Dispensa, chief enterprise architect at MediaBrands World Wide, offered a few details about his bakeoff. Microsoft’s Azure was an easy fit for MediaBrands’ developers, but had limited SQL storage. Rackspace had a grid option, but APIs were limited and its on-demand server business was less than a year old. AWS won the deal based on features and experience with other similar customers. Here’s Dispensa’s comparison slide:
- Watch your budget when you move to AWS. A handful of AWS customers said that cloud computing is less expensive, but can be too easy to use and blow your budget. Simply put, any developer with a credit card can get provision a machine. If too many people use AWS you have cloud sprawl quickly and blow your computing budget. “It’s too easy and that can hurt your cost controls,” said Dispensa. “It’s cheaper, but can get unwieldy.” Dispensa said he put in a process where managers have to approve a developer’s request to use an AWS server and there are financial thresholds. That process is why it takes 15 minutes for an AWS server instead of 2 seconds. Pfizer’s Michael Miller, senior director of research, high performance computing, had a similar beef. “Allocate money upfront and then run the meter to avoid big surprises,” said Miller. “There are challenges when doing AWS at scale for a large number of users. Pay as you go is nice, but a debit model would even be better so it’s not so easy to spend more than you have.”
- The linchpin of Amazon’s reliability case revolves around “availability zones. When you get an AWS computing resource it’s assigned by region. Regions include U.S. (east and west), EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Singapore). These regions include at least three availability zones—a data center hub roughly speaking. AWS is architected so two availability zones can fail concurrently and data is still protected. Amazon’s aim is to eliminate any single point of failure, because IT fails all the time. AWS recommends that customers spread their assets around multiple availability zones in a region.
- Phased implementations make more sense. Amazon customers across the board said they shied away from big bang projects when moving to AWS. Jennifer Boden, director of IT at Amazon, is moving the company’s internal systems—financial, email and calendar, HR applications and knowledge management tools—to AWS, but the projects are phased. “Take a phased approach, make it easy and have no big bang projects,” said Boden. Continue Reading
Article Credit to Larry Dignan at ZDnet
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Cloud as the new buzz in Health IT
Jun 23rd
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 contained billions of dollars aimed at moving U.S. healthcare onto an electronic platform. Much of it, described in the HITECH section of ARRA, is earmarked for incentive payments to physicians for demonstrating “meaningful use of certified EHRs,” paid out through Medicare and Medicaid. SaaS-based (software-as-a-service) Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are stepping onto the main stage as the most likely way that smaller and solo practices will be able to adopt EHRs in a meaningful way, in time for the 2011 ARRA/HITECH incentive moneys. SaaS-based software has also been referred to as cloud-based computing, web-based software, ASP-delivered software, and other terms (not all exactly the same from a technical standpoint, but often used interchangeably). So what is this new “hot buzz” all about and why is it important in the world of Health IT?
Elimination of IT burden
SaaS-based software is internet hosted, and accessed through an ordinary web browser. That means that the vendor, not the clinician, bears the burden of all the back-end heavy lifting – servers, always-available access, security and safety of data, and backup of data are all issues that are removed from the clinician.
This is a significant difference compared to legacy client/server software, which require a local installation onto a server, the maintenance of a secure local network (with perhaps a Citrix layer to access it from outside the confines of the office and network), and local policies for safety and security, as well as data backup. This generally requires the need to hire an IT consultant, and adds “hidden” cost to the whole EHR installation.
Version control
Another limitation of a locally installed legacy client/server system is that, once it is installed, then it is “set.” Upgrades and bug fixes require the application of a patch, or installation of a new version. Often, a fee (per upgrade, or per year) is charged by the vendor for this support.
A SaaS-based EHR avoids this issue of “version control” – everyone, by definition, is on the same version. When changes or upgrades are deployed, everyone receives these changes on their next session log-on. From the standpoint of support, this is much easier, and feature fixes as well as bug fixes can be managed quickly, and deployed to everyone at once.
Customizable UI, per role, per specialty
One of the criticisms made about SaaS-based EHR products is that they are “one size fits all.” This may really limit the usability of a given product. Therefore, a customized, specialty-specific EHR may work better, given that the workflows faced by different specialties are, in fact, quite different.
Using modern technology, it is possible to capture many elements of a user upon login, and create a product that delivers a view (the User Interface, or UI) that can be very individualized. Within a given medical practice, different users have different needs, depending on their role – what a front-office check-in staff member and scheduler needs are different than a back-office nurse, which is different from what the clinician needs.
Similarly, what a Family Physician needs from an EHR may be quite different from what an Orthopedist needs, or what an Oncologist needs. Such workflow needs are beyond simply presenting a different set of charting templates (though that is certainly a start). Though not fully actualized presently, modern SaaS-based technology can move in this direction such that upon login to a SaaS-based product, the features presented by default (the UI) will vary depending on specialty, role, and individual preferences.
Learning curve
One of the biggest fears about moving from a paper medical record environment to an electronic one is the concern about a prolonged learning curve and a consequent dip in productivity. This dip in productivity can be significant and can last a long time (e.g. months). This is especially concerning for small primary care practices that run very close to the margin. In a fee-for-service system physicians have little time for much else other than processing high patient volumes through the office. Anything that introduces a slowdown in this frenetic pace is worrisome.
Yet these precise practices are the ones that the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) wants to get on board with EHRs. Even if the EHR is SaaS-based (minimal IT infrastructure costs), and free, the worry about work slow-down during the adoption phase is an obstacle to adoption and use of an EHR in a meaningful way.
Thus, regardless of the style of EHR deployment, the burden is on EHR developers and vendors to create products that minimize the learning curve. Usability is paramount. Incorporation of user suggestions into the product is very important.
A lightweight, intuitive, responsive EHR is the goal for all us of who are creating the tools needed in order to achieve the transformation of U.S. healthcare from a paper-based legacy to a modern electronically-connected one.
Guest Writer For CloudTweaks:
Ryan Howard
Chief Executive Officer, Practice Fusion, Inc.
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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
