Posts tagged Storage

Practically Speaking about Cloud Computing – Series by Cloudtweaks

Practically speaking: Gartner declared that Cloud Computing is at its peak of the Hype Cycle with inflated expectations in 2010. We are witnessing the same in Amazon Web Services reality now. The talk is no longer about its definitions or security concerns. As cloud computing is entering into the offices of CIOs, CTOs, CFOs and CEOs with a bang, it is execution time. In this Practically Speaking Cloud Computing Series in Cloudtweaks, let us have information-exchange of practical knowledge and experience.

Practically Speaking about Amazon Web Services – Part I: “The Evolution of Amazon AWS”

Last week Amazon celebrated their fourth birthday of its Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2). No doubt that Amazon Web Services is the pioneer and poster child of cloud computing. It is quite appropriate that we take Amazon Web Services as first to go for Practically Speaking:

Cloudtweaks Cloud Computing talks.

If we have a look at Google Trends for cloud computing, we can note that the whole thing started in the year 2007. Since then, particularly in the past four years, 2009 and 2010 have been the years of peak. Almost all major hardware and software IT vendors announced their strategy and service offerings in these two years. They include Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, Google, HP, Dell, Intel and so many others.

Google Trends for cloud computing all regions_ Cloudtweaks chart.

However, Amazon Web Services started its Amazon EC2 Service from the year 2006 itself.

Google Trends for Amazon Web Services all regions Cloudtweaks Chart.

VMware Expands ‘Cloud’ Strategy – vCloud Director

Aug 30th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Amazon

By BEN WORTHEN Via The Wall Street Journal

As technology giants rush to add products and services for the fast-growing part of the industry known as cloud computing, VMware Inc.—a Silicon Valley company that helped usher in the mania—is readying a new push of its own.

Cloud computing is an industry term for information that is stored remotely on equipment operated by outside specialists and accessed via the Internet.

At its annual conference this week, VMware on Tuesday will unveil technology aimed at both making it easier for businesses to move information into the cloud and to run their own data centers more efficiently.

Dubbed vCloud Director, VMware’s new software is aimed at letting businesses set up server-computer systems to run new programs more quickly than the days or weeks it often takes now.

The product also helps companies track in more detail the computing resources these programs consume.

It also gives businesses the ability determine on the fly whether a program will run on their own computers or “in the cloud.”

Running a data center “will become increasingly a business discussion,” and not a series of technical decisions, said Paul Maritz, VMware’s chief executive.

Update – 3PAR Accepts Matching Acquisition Offer by Dell

Aug 27th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Cloud Computing

Revised Transaction Valued at Approximately $1.8 Billion

FREMONT, CA–(Marketwire – August 27, 2010) – 3PAR® (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, today announced it has accepted a

matching offer to be acquired by Dell for a price of $27 per share, or approximately $1.8 billion, net of 3PAR’s cash. Accordingly, 3PAR and Dell have signed a second amendment to their previously announced merger agreement reflecting the new offer price, and maintaining the termination fee unchanged at $72 million, which is payable in the event that 3PAR receives and accepts another unsolicited acquisition proposal that its board determines to be superior to Dell’s increased offer.

The cash tender offer commenced on August 23, 2010 by Dell, through a wholly-owned subsidiary, is for all outstanding shares of 3PAR common stock, without interest, and subject to reduction for any federal back-up withholding or other taxes. The offer documents will be amended to reflect the new offer price, but this will not alter the timing of the acquisition. Unless extended, the tender offer and any withdrawal rights to which 3PAR stockholders may be entitled will expire at midnight, EDT, on Sept. 20, 2010. Following acceptance for payment of shares in the tender offer and completion of the transactions contemplated in the merger agreement, 3PAR would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell.

The board of directors of 3PAR continues to unanimously recommend that 3PAR stockholders accept Dell’s tender offer and tender their shares in such offer.

About 3PAR
3PAR® (NYSE: PAR) is the leading global provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized, dynamically tiered, multi-tenant storage arrays built for public and private cloud computing. Our virtualized storage platform was built from the ground up to be agile and efficient and to eliminate the limitations of traditional storage arrays for utility infrastructures. As a pioneer of thin provisioning and other storage virtualization technologies, we design our products to reduce power consumption to help companies meet their green computing initiatives and to cut storage total cost of ownership. 3PAR customers have used our self-managing, efficient, and adaptable utility storage systems to reduce administration time and provisioning complexity, to improve server and storage utilization, and to scale and adapt flexibly in response to continuous growth and changing business needs. For more information, visit the 3PAR Website at: www.3PAR.com.

HP continues its position by increasing the bid for 3Par Inc

Aug 27th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Business

By Associated Press

SEATTLE — Hewlett-Packard Co. has again raised its bid for 3Par Inc. above an offer from rival Dell Inc., suggesting that the little-known data-storage maker could be worth more with one of the PC companies’ marketing muscle behind it.

The latest offer from HP for $27 per share in cash, or about $1.69 billion, is nearly three times what 3Par had been trading at before Dell made the first bid last week.

Earlier on Thursday, Dell said 3Par had accepted its second offer of $24.30 per share in cash, or $1.52 billion. Dell made its first offer, $18 per share, for 3Par on Aug. 16, and HP responded Monday with a bid of $24 per share.

HP and Dell, two of the world’s largest personal computer makers, are looking at 3Par as a way to build up their “cloud computing” businesses, which involve delivering software, data storage and other services to customers over the Internet. Either company would buy 3Par in part to cut data-storage costs.

Before the bidding began, 3Par had been trading at about $10 per share. Some analysts described even Dell’s initial offer price, at two-thirds of HP’s latest bid, as too steep.

But Andy Hargreaves, an analyst for Pacific Crest Securities, said Thursday that Dell and HP are willing to pay more than twice 3Par’s previous value because they believe they have the marketing and distribution muscle to turn 3Par into a much larger business. Revenue for 3Par in the most recent fiscal year, which ended in March, was $194 million — less than 1 percent of Dell’s revenue in the most recent year.

HP Fuels Private Cloud Adoption

Aug 25th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Cloud Computing

Announces Private Cloud Readiness Program, Cloud Boot Camp and Cloud Advisor team

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 25, 2010

HP today unveiled a Private Cloud Readiness Program consisting of self-assessment tools and a Cloud Boot Camp to be held during the VMworld conference next week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

The company also announced a team of experts who, as pioneers in cloud computing, are driving future innovations and assisting clients with advanced cloud deployments.

Get ready to assess, plan, deploy

HP has designed a private cloud scorecard that enables companies to rate and rank key factors that help determine their “cloud readiness.” Questions range from rating internal knowledge of cloud concepts and services to existing cloud security capabilities. View the scorecard at www.hp.com/go/cloudassessment.

HP also is offering a Cloud Boot Camp for clients during VMworld to be held on Sept. 2 from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. PT at the Westin Hotel (“Press Room”). Developed and conducted by technology experts, the boot camp will provide participants the knowledge needed to transform their infrastructures, applications and processes for the private cloud. VMworld attendees can register at the HP Cloud Assessment room from noon to 6 p.m. PT on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1.

There is also a Cloud Boot Camp and breakfast specifically for analysts and media. Details are below.

Meet the HP Cloud Advisors

With combined experience of nearly 200 years, the HP Cloud Advisors consist of the best technical and strategic minds in cloud computing. They offer a unique combination of vision and real-world experience, as well as a distinct point of view. Each was hand-picked based on the innovations they influenced, their knowledge and their expertise. The HP Cloud Advisors are:

Nigel Cook is an HP technology director and strategist. He is an integral part of the leadership team spearheading the DMTF Cloud Management Working Group. He was previously part of the DMTF Cloud Incubator, formulating technology submissions, requirements and use cases for interoperability between an enterprise data center and Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds.
A noted cloud computing expert, Jamie Erbes is chief technology officer for the Software and Solutions business at HP. She is responsible for driving the company’s strategy for IT management software. Follow Erbes on Twitter.
Archie Reed leads the security component of HP’s cloud computing strategy, offering guidance across architecture, products, research and development, and cloud implementation in high-profile environments. Follow Reed on Twitter.
Lee Kedrie is chief brand officer and evangelist for Technology Consulting at HP. He leads teams that augment organizational, cultural, governance and operational processes for enterprise clients so shared services and cloud computing become workable realities in organizations.
As chief technologist for the enterprise storage business, Paul Perez is HP’s predominant expert on how storage fits within a Converged Infrastructure, particularly within a cloud computing framework.
Mark Shoemaker is a 20-year industry veteran with experience covering the scope of cloud service management, cloud automation, visibility and control, bringing virtualization into the data center, standards, and public cloud versus private cloud considerations.

The HP Cloud Advisors will be available at the VMworld conference, to be held Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, to answer client questions, provide tips on private cloud planning and discuss successful deployments. In addition, HP will present more than 20 educational sessions focused on private cloud, virtualized infrastructure and client virtualization at the HP booth 1008.

9 Great Open Source Cloud Services to help build your business

Aug 17th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Amazon

DuraSpace

The DuraSpace organization unveiled the open source code for the new DuraCloud platform, a hosted service and open technology that makes it easy for organizations and end users to use cloud services. DuraCloud is an open source platform that is built upon commercial cloud infrastructure. The platform itself deploys into a cloud server environment and is integrated with multiple cloud storage providers, including Amazon AWS and RackSpace.

OpenStack

What the software does: The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.

Enomaly

Elastic Computing Platform (Enomaly ECP) has often been described as the world’s first true IaaS platform. Enomaly is the leader in empowering telecom, IDC and managed hosting operators to deliver the benefits of Cloud Computing to their customers As one of the earliest pioneers of cloud computing, Enomaly has the experience to help you monetize the cloud.

Cloudera

offers enterprises a powerful new data platform built on the popular Apache Hadoop open-source software package. We unlock the storage and processing technologies of the world’s biggest Web companies, allowing our growing list of global customers to use Hadoop to solve problems and achieve their particular business needs.

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is an open source solution that originates from an NSF funded research project at University of California, Santa Barbara. The open source model is generally considered a superior way of creating infrastructure software. Innovation is faster, users and customers have more freedom and flexibility, lock-in is avoided, and secondary benefits accrue from the massive ecosystems that naturally evolve around the most prolific open source products.

Hibari

Gemini Mobile Technologies (“Gemini”) announced at “Wireless Japan 2010″ in Tokyo that it will release Hibari (meaning “Cloud Bird” in Japanese) as open source. Hibari is a database optimized for the highly reliable, highly available storage of massive data, so-called “Big Data.” Hibari can be used in Cloud Computing Applications such as web mail, Social Networking Services (SNS), and other services requiring storage of tera-bytes and peta-bytes of new daily data.

Globus Nimbus

Nimbus is a set of open source tools that together provide an “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) cloud computing solution. Our mission is to evolve the infrastructure with emphasis on the needs of science, but many non-scientific use cases are supported as well.

Nimbus allows a client to lease remote resources by deploying virtual machines (VMs) on those resources and configuring them to represent an environment desired by the user.

OpenNebula

OpenNebula is an open-source toolkit to easily build any type of cloud: private, public and hybrid. OpenNebula has been designed to be integrated with any networking and storage solution and so to fit into any existing data center.

With OpenNebula you can transform your data center into a flexible and agile virtual infrastructure which dynamically adapts to the changing demands of the service workload.

Joyent

Joyent’s Smart Technologies provide application virtualization, which is different from all other major cloud vendors who are focused on hardware virtualization. Joyent’s approach provides applications with better performance and cost effectiveness, due to higher application density and hardware utilization in our Smart Technology stack.

By CloudTweaks

Why Cloud Based Computing is the Best Practice to Adopt

Aug 10th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Business

2 comments

Cloud based computing offers the most sought after advantages to corporations and all with reduced cost and easy implementation. With the passage of time corporations are becoming more specialized and skilled in their operations. Instead of doing everything themselves, they concentrate more on their specific area and get services from other vendors for related tasks. Cloud computing is one of such services in which companies are free from responsibilities to maintain and manage their data and to get software application for their routine operations.

Here are some advantages which make cloud computing the best practice to adopt.

1. Reduced Cost

Cloud based services greatly reduce the capital expenditure of software, hardware and services. In cloud based services companies have to pay only for what they use. It also saves a lot of space and hardware for the company’s DBMS.

2. More Agile

Cloud based services are more agile because vendors offer services on demand with no time wastage on software development and deployment. The changes in requirements are easy and fast to accommodate.

3. Scalability

Cloud based services suit business of all sizes and types. You don’t have to buy on all or none principal and don’t have to pay for services and modules you don’t use. Since the cloud based vendors charge on utility bill method, the corporations can add and subtract services from its usage as the requirements change.

4. Increased Storage

Corporations can have access to increased storage at a low price as compared to that of company servers or private computers.

5. Specialization of Operations

Cloud based services free your IT department resources from managing and maintaining the IT related tasks. So you can downsize your IT department and concentrate more on your business critical tasks to excel in the market.

Datapipe Appoints Vice President of Cloud Strategy and Architecture

Aug 10th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Business

JERSEY CITY, NJ–(Marketwire – August 10, 2010) – Datapipe, a leading provider of managed hosting and IT services, today announced the expansion of its leadership team with the appointment of Ed Laczynski as Vice President of Cloud Strategy and Architecture. He will be responsible for driving Datapipe’s cloud computing strategy and the architecture of new cloud platforms and integrations.

Laczynski brings more than 10 years of digital technology leadership experience to Datapipe, most recently as the founder and CTO of LTech, a pioneer in enterprise cloud computing products and services. At LTech, he led the business and product development vision, achieving significant sales and customer growth. A frequent speaker and author, Laczynski is recognized throughout the industry for his thought leadership, vision and experience helping organizations succeed with cloud computing. He has also led innovation in digital media and finance in roles at McCann-Erickson Worldwide and Credit Suisse. Laczynski is a graduate of New York University.

“Ed is a cloud computing expert and dynamic business leader,” said Robb Allen, Chief Executive Officer for Datapipe. “He will play a critical role on our leadership team as we continue to experience rapid growth in delivering high-value, cloud-based solutions. Ed’s broad technical experience and proven ability to lead teams successfully is a winning combination for Datapipe and our clients,” Allen said.

Commenting on his appointment, Mr. Laczynski said, “I am excited to join Datapipe, a leader in enterprise cloud computing. Known for their world class customer service, Datapipe has a global presence and a wealth of talented people committed to delivering the benefits of cloud computing to their clients. Datapipe is already growing their cloud offerings with the Stratosphere platform, and I’m pleased to lead the team to build new solutions around both private and public cloud services.”

About DataPipe
Datapipe provides custom managed hosting solutions for businesses with complex Internet facing infrastructures. We proactively manage security, monitoring, storage, data center operations, servers, and applications including database administration and the full software stack. The company provides services to more than 1000 customers in six data centers and eight office locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. Datapipe was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey. http://www.datapipe.com

Cloud-based solutions – When to plug business cracks with technology

Aug 9th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Apps

When a small business first starts up, there’s a good chance everything it needs resides on the founder’s PC. Customer lists might be in word processor documents or spreadsheets, and assets are probably scarce enough to be tracked on paper.

But as the business grows and additional staff and computers are added, especially if they’re laptops, the number and criticality of files on various PCs gets to the point where it’s too risky to keep them where they are. And when any given laptop is out of the office, so are important pieces of the business.

So, all you need to do is put a desktop PC on your network and share its files, right?

Maybe not. If you have more than four or five employees in need of shared resources, peer-to-peer file sharing is likely neither practical nor safe for those critical files. It may be time to bring a server into the mix.

A server is a computer that’s designed to sit on a network and provide centralized services such as file sharing and e-mail. It is not necessarily super-powerful, nor does it need some of the niceties we expect on personal computers, such as high-end graphics. It is designed to be stable and robust, since it always needs to be available, and it must be secure to protect critical business data.

How do you know whether your business needs a server?

Geoff Kereluik, VP of commercial sales for HP Canada, says one clue is if you get to the point where communication needs among employees are no longer being met. For example, if customer orders are being kept in a spreadsheet, and you have enough customers that it becomes unmanageable and things start falling through the cracks, it’s time to plug those cracks with technology.