Tag: cloud-computing

  • iSuppli: Cloud Computing Can Effectively Leverage Blade Servers and Virtualization

    Although global shipments of blade servers are set to decline in 2009, the market is expected to return to robust double-digit growth during the following years as global economic conditions improve, according to iSuppli.

    Blade server shipments will amount to 1.04 million units in 2009, down 9 percent from 1.14 million in 2008. This contrasts sharply with the 31.1 percent increase in 2008.

    “In its short history, the blade server market has been able to slash through whatever obstacles the global economy and technology business have placed in front of it. However, in 2009, the blade servers couldn’t cut through the global economic downturn, causing shipments to decline for the first time ever,” said Peter Lin, the iSuppli analyst.

    iSuppli has been continually reducing its shipment forecast throughout the year. According to them, the main factor impacting the market is conservative corporate Information Technology spending at the end of 2008 and in 2009 resulting from the recession.

    Analysts expect that the blade server market will regain its edge somewhat in 2010, when the worldwide economy improves. By 2013, the market will more than double from its 2008 level to more than 2 million units.

    During the period from 2008 to 2013, the blade server market will expand at a CAGR of 13.9 percent, 10 times higher than the server market as a whole. By 2013, blades will account for 23.1 percent of all server shipments, up from 12.9 percent in 2008.

    “This clearly indicates that the blade segment will be the fastest-growing and most important segment of the server industry through 2013,” Lin said.

    Although iSuppli has reduced the total server shipment forecast due to the worldwide economic recession, the company retains its belief that virtualization offers a number of benefits in the consolidation of server infrastructure.

    Virtualization provides a more efficient server roll-out strategy, which will accelerate enterprise adoption. Therefore, iSuppli’s virtualization forecast is a mid-to-high penetration scenario, where we believe virtualization server penetration of total server shipments will rise at a CAGR of 18.8 percent during the period from 2008 to 2013,” iSuppli states.

    The research group also believes that cloud computing can effectively leverage blade servers and virtualization. “Seeing the potential for cloud computing, there is a race among the main players, which iSuppli believes will become increasingly fierce as the demand for cloud computing keeps growing,” they say.

    According to iSuppli, cloud computing will have a negative effect on server shipments. However, they say, there will be more applications released and users will demand better service levels. Therefore, the demand from the cloud computing service providers will keep increasing, which will offset the negative effect, as they claim.

  • In The Era Of Virtualization: Interview with Richard Gilder, CEO of Intercept

    The cloud has been a popular computing term for 2009 and going into 2010 will likely see the rise of that term as content become more accessible from multiple location as opposed to being locked down by local storage.

    Already users of cloud computing are experiencing more success as costs are lowered, work and necessary files are accessible from anywhere, reducing the need to be directly in front of a computer in the office or at home. More incredible is the access mobile devices have now in accessing necessary files, content, and sites as we move into an era where virtualization becomes more commonplace.

    Intercept is a virtualization company within the UK specializing in desktop virtualization, server virtualization, application virtualization and storage virtualization. A very large part of their business is based in the cloud. Majority of our clients seek virtual hosting for their enterprise computers. They  basically help develop a system allowing generic access, via the cloud, to any application that a company has.

    When asked about the innovation of Intercept, Richard Gilder, CEO of Intercept replies, "we are now in the process of putting together some new services which are now launched which is exchange share point and we’ve got another CRM coming on site soon."

    Fear of the Cloud

    Richard Gilder

    For many companies, much like it is with anything new, there is still that hesitation when adopting new ways of doing business. The cloud has been on the receiving end of both criticism and praise, and ultimately both sides have solid cases, it’s strong companies and good practices that can prevent catastrophic data loss and ensure a smooth changeover and maintenance of the idea.

    "I think the biggest fear is actually within the wording that your putting your data and storing it ‘in the cloud’. This is actually probably the most frightening thing about it. Its going via the cloud and will be completely replicated to multiple data centers for redundancy purposes," says Richard.

    The idea of giving up that control on your content and not having it locally stored is not an uncommon fear. Looking at things on a more personal level, using simplified tools like Google Documents has raised severe concern over ownership of content placed on equipment that is not technically "yours."

    If content is suddenly gone, what is the actual cost on the client. In terms of personal documents, it may be subjective, but when working with large corporations, the loss could be financially devastating. Releasing the grip on the the way things have always been done is most certainly an uphill battle, but thee are many factors that can make cloud computing appealing to the client.

    Money savings in terms of man power and equipment is a major selling point, reduction of carbon footprint is huge for the green enthusiasts, consistent and professionally reliable customer service personnel to answer questions for clients and address their needs, and finally, a long list of client success with the transition of locally stored data and applications to virtual cloud services.

    Advancements In the Field of Virtualization

    Significant advances have been made in the field of virtualization in just the last few years, but do the clients grow at the same pace, or does Intercept see that the technology completely outpaces the needs of the user?

    "Generally the clients infrastructure is growing at a rate in which the technology is actually growing faster," says Richard. "We’ve had a tough couple of years with a country wide perspective in people spending upward with technology has lapsed slightly."

    In the last two years alone Richard has seen people and companies become incredibly receptive to change and enthusiastic with the coming technologies. Intercept tends to focus the clients on the scalability, hardware savings, and most importantly in today’s green focused society, energy savings.

    It’s apparent that technology is not the only thing advancing at great rates, but also the reduction of the carbon footprint by many companies like Intercept that offer large scale businesses the ability to tap into a virtual network in order to get their job done.

    "Its an absolute colossal benefit and I think this should be pushed more and more from a green point of view. We run green government events, we run green events across the country and we should be pushing this side of things. We all are very very worried about climate change certainly not just in the UK where it rains a lot but within the global environment." Richard responds when asked what he and Intercept feel with regards to the green impact of virtualization.

    Conferences and Expos

    Intercept is always providing briefings in the UK regarding the virtualization market. The IP Expo is their biggest event for the quarter thus far, but several Ustream events are being planned right after Christmas.

    They had 5 seminars which they ran focusing on some of their key clients, such as Windsor & Maidenhead, which show colossal cost savings up in excess of 350,000 pounds the first year, all the way through to Ed Lowry’s, which is a very large law firm in London who virtualized their infrastructure over the last couple of years.

    Plans are being made currently for the 2010 year where they hope to continue their success at demonstrating the bonuses of moving to the cloud and worrying not about the data and not about the company’s security, but rather where the company is going and how it can be more successful. Richard Gilder, CEO of Intercept says shifting that focus for them is what he likes to do.

  • Vordel Introduces Cloud Service Broker to Manage Multi-Domain Services

    Vordel, a provider of governance products for Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), released the Vordel Cloud Service Broker that aggregates and manages multi-domain services.

    Organizations who wish to use Cloud services in conjunction with their own SOA and those of their partners face major issues related to reliability and trustworthiness. One significant challenge is aggregating services from multiple domains including Public, Private and Community Clouds – into coherent composite services and applying policies to them.

    The Vordel says its Cloud Service Broker solves this multi-domain problem by registering services from all three domains into a single repository – the multi-domain registry repository – enabling monitoring, management and policy enforcement.

    The Multi-Domain Registry (MDRR) aggregates together services across domains. These domains include not only Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google, but also local on-premises services, and business partner services.

    In this way, all of the services on which a business depends are managed in one place. This becomes a single point at which compliance to Service Level Agreements, compliance to privacy and security mandates, and usage statistics can be viewed.

    Vordel Cloud Service Broker provides audit trail of Cloud service usage – analytics of Cloud Computing usage includes not only raw usage information, but also information about service quality, patterns of usage over time, and identity of users.

    It also allows developers to link together local applications with Cloud-hosted applications. The local applications may be accessed via Web Services interfaces, via database calls, via message schemes such as MQ or JMS or simply via the file system.

    Throttling is the “surge protector” of Cloud Computing. If an application makes a high number of calls to a Cloud service then the Verdel’s new service can deflect a portion of the calls to back-up service, newly provisioned for this purpose.

    Vordel CEO, Vic Morris, speaking about the Cloud Service Broker at VordelWorld in Dublin, said "Trust is a major barrier to Cloud adoption particularly among enterprises. It’s clear that many organizations see the value of incorporating Cloud Services into their IT infrastructure, but they also have concerns about the reliability and performance of these services outside their domain of control.

    “The Vordel Cloud Service Broker addresses these issues by providing a trustworthy and reliable onramp to Cloud services allowing businesses to monitor and manage them in the same fashion as their own internal services. This means that composite applications can be built in a completely seamless fashion offering users full visibility, trust and control," he added.

  • AFCOM Survey: Most Data Centers Not Ready for Cyberattack

    Significant findings of AFCOM’s 2009/2010 Data Center Trends survey reveal that though threat of cyber terrorism is real, it is not being adequately addressed by the world’s keepers of the most confidential financial, military and personal data.

    Survey also reveals that despite hype around cloud computing, only 14.9 percent of data centers have deployed cloud solutions to date – and it shines a new light on the fate of mainframes.

    In addition, it reveals the government is behind its private industry counterparts in terms of greening initiatives.

    Meanwhile, it shows that the mainframe may be losing its place in worldwide data centers, as servers become more capable.

    And cloud computing, despite the hype, hasn’t pushed beyond 15 percent acceptance at this point. In comparison, 73 percent have implemented virtual processing.

    Data center greening

    The survey re-iterates that greening of the data center is no longer just a concept – it is actually taking place, and on a large scale, with 71.3 percent of all respondents indicating they are actively engaged in greening initiatives at this time.

    And while 71.3 percent are, in fact, engaged in greening, only 42.2 percent have a “formal” greening initiative.

    According to respondents, the most important results they have experienced as a result of implementing green measures are in power efficiency, 60.8 percent report they are using less power and 51.4 percent have implement cooling efficiency strategies. In addition to power and cooling efficiencies, 11.5 percent also report a significant savings in water usage.

    Data centers & cyber terrorism

    Data center professionals must be well-equipped to handle and respond to cyber terrorist attacks, but according to AFCOM’s survey, there’s considerable room for improvement.

    Respondents revealed that 60.9 percent of all data centers worldwide officially recognize cyber terrorism as a threat they need to deal with, but only a little over one-third (34.4 percent) have included it in their disaster/recovery plans, which would include their best defense plans if attacked.

    Only one in four, or 24.8 percent, has addressed cyber terrorism in their policies and procedures manuals and only 60.2 percent have a written policies and procedures manual.

    Meanwhile, less than one in five, or 19.7 percent provide any cyber terrorism employee training. On the positive side, however, 82.4 percent report that they do perform background security checks on all potential new employees, another solid defense against cyber terrorists.

    Data center consolidation

    As the economy suffers, more companies have traditionally looked to consolidation as a method of saving money. The economic downturn we are experiencing today is no exception, with 62.1 percent of all respondents either already in the process of consolidating one or more data centers, or seriously considering it.

    More than half of respondents (52.1 percent) plan to relocate their newly consolidated data center to another existing facility, or build an entirely new one to accommodate the additional requirements.

    Emerging technologies

    According to the survey, the technologies with the highest levels of adoption in today’s data centers are: virtual processing, implemented by 72.9 percent of all respondents, Web applications (70.4 percent), automation (54.8 percent) cluster computing (50. percent), and cloud computing (14.9 percent).

    Surprisingly, in addition to the slim 14.9 percent who utilize cloud computing, this technology has been considered by an additional 46.3 percent, but never implemented.

    “Our analysis shows that data center managers need to develop more comprehensive cyber terrorism policies, and get more aggressive in greening, particularly in government agencies where greening lags behind private industry. Finally, it’s time to decide where the mainframe is still viable and needed, and where high-end servers can do a more efficient job,” said Jill Eckhaus, CEO of AFCOM.

    AFCOM is the data center association that represents both the IT and facilities side of the data center. Respondents, part of AFCOM’s 4,500 member data center sites, represent 27 countries, 83 percent in the U.S. and 17 percent overseas; 60 percent are responsible for Information Technology, 31 percent Facilities and 9 percent represent other roles in the data center

    AFCOM 2010 Data Center World will take place March 7-10, 2010 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, TN.

  • Sandisk Sees Growth In Mobile Devices


    Sandisk expects increased demand for its mobile storage products as a result of continued growth in the smartphone, MIDs and notebooks sectors.

    The flash memory provider said demand for its mobile solutions was actually increasing – as were prices.

    Eli Harari, Sandisk’s CEO, speaking in its first quarter earnings this week, said he expected demand for NAND to continue to grow particularly for mobile and portable computing platforms.

    He said this would help absorb the industry supply growth projected for second half of 2009 and ensure price stability.

    Pointing to the changes currently taking place in the mobile market, he compared them to those experienced by the Internet in its early days.

    He said these would also have important implications for Sandisk’s mobile storage business.

    Apple’s iPhone and its App Store, RIM’s Blackberry Market, the adoption of Android by smartphone makers, as well as Nokia and Microsoft’s plans were all mentioned as playing a role in fuelling the demand for flash memory.

    "The opportunity for us is these devices will have to be content with wireless bandwidth and coverage limitations, making off-line, local caching of increased amount of data, central to devices’ usability," he said.

    "Paradoxically, the promise of always-connected devices in cloud computing is resulting in the ever greater need for local storage on the devices themselves."

    Harai said Sandisk was seeing increasing demand from "major players" in the mobile ecosystem for its mobile storage solutions, including Mobile Card, embedded iNAND and solid state drives for notebook PC’s.

  • Cloudera Aims To Capture Data Center Market With Hadoop Cloud Solution


    A startup software dealer is bringing cloud-computing technology used by the likes of Yahoo, Facebook and Google to regular enterprise data centers.

    Silicon Valley-based Cloudera plans to make big data-processing capabilities accessible and affordable for all companies, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, said Hadoop is a cloud-computing technology used to store and process petabytes of data on systems consisting of hundreds or even thousands of servers.

    "Processing this kind of big data has been too expensive or too technically difficult for all but the most sophisticated IT organizations until now," he said.

    IDC speculates that the global IT expenditure on cloud services will expand approximately threefold in the next 2-3 years, when it is estimated to total USD $42 billion and account for close to 9 per cent of revenues in five important market sectors.

    IDC also predicts that expenditure on cloud computing will pick up pace throughout the next 2-3 years, and will most likely secure 25 per cent of IT spending growth in 2012.

    This is expected to grow the following year and capture at least a 1/3rd of the market.

    David Smith, Gartner’s vice president, thinks that cloud computing still has some way to go and the competition is just starting.

    "Cloudera is not the only company supporting Hadoop. HP is doing a lot of work with Hadoop, as is Yahoo," he said.

    However, there is a major difference between Cloudera and the others like Yahoo.

    Cloudera is set up as a specific one-stop shop for the free Java software structure that presently sanctions the cloud.

    Christophe Bisciglia, Cloudera’s founder and former manager of Google’s Hadoop cluster, said that listening to the community, he consistently hears that Hadoop installation, configuration, and deployment needs to be easier.

    "That’s the primary reason why we built the Cloudera distribution for Hadoop," he said.

    "But furthermore, a distribution fosters community growth by providing a common platform to share code, experience and, most importantly, innovation."

    Cloudera’s latest Web-based configuration tool will facilitate enterprises to produce custom-tailored packages that meet their exact wants.

    In addition, Cloudera is making a preconfigured VMware image liberally offered for assessment and use with the company’s complimentary online teaching.

    "The Cloudera distribution of Hadoop gives you the same tools you already know to provide standardized packaging and automatic configuration," said Bisciglia.

    He said that Cloudera’s sharing of Hadoop has always been founded on a established code of reliability.

    "We enable users to limit upgrades to major project milestones built on code that is tried, trusted, and proven reliable," he said.

    Finally, there will always be a few users who will need assistance in setting up and using the software for some critical adventures and this is where Cloudera will make up the money.

    "These enterprises need a company to stand behind the package, and help them find and fix problems when they come up," said Olson.

  • Three Quarters Of Organisations To Increase Cloud Computing Security


    A survey by Infosecurity Europe of 470 organisations has found that 75 per cent intend to reallocate or increase budgets to secure cloud computing and software as a service within the next 12 months.

    However, interviews conducted with a panel of 20 chief information Security Officers (CISOs) of large enterprises also found concerns about availability and security aspects of software services in the cloud.

    They were especially concerned about the lack of standards for working in the cloud, SAAS and secure internet access, all of them said that they would welcome the development of guidelines in this area.

    Tamar Beck, group event director of Infosecurity Europe, said cloud computing and SAAS have a pivotal role to play in today’s evolving environment.

    CIOs are being challenged to add value to the business and CISOs required to ensure that new services are reliable and secure.

  • ParaScale CEO Says 2009 To Be Year Cloud Storage Breaks Out


    Cloud computing – including cloud storage – will transform the industry and become the predominant way in which IT is consumed.

    That’s the prediction of Sajai Krishnan, CEO of Silicon Valley start-up ParaScale.

    He said there has been a rapid heightening of interest recently in all things cloud – applications, computing and storage.

    As a result enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud storage as a way to enable flexible computing power over the Internet, according to Krishnan.

    "We believe the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed as we move forward," he said.

    Sajai Krishnan, CEO ParaScale

    Krishnan said a company could buy cloud storage – where the company builds a private or internal cloud – or rent it – where the company rents by the GB per month from a public cloud storage service provider.

    Regardless of whichever method was chosen, he said the advantages of cloud storage would soon be as mainstream as the architectures that came before it, including 3-tier web applications, client/server and mainframe.

    But like most emerging technology there had been some initial hesitancy towards adopting it.

    Krishnan said that in 2008, many companies were wary of the risks and vulnerabilities of participating in the cloud computing model.

    So despite the buzz around the technology being high, adoption was feathered.

    “This all changes in 2009 – the economic downturn and the addition of private cloud solutions to complement public offerings are creating an environment that enables incremental adoption of cloud storage on a very broad scale," he said.

    Krishnan said discussions with end users had shown that the overwhelming majority indicate they are considering both public and private cloud storage.

    He identifies several considerations driving the adoption of storage clouds. These include:

    • Building storage clouds is becoming as simple as installing a new application on your laptop. This is enabling service providers and the enterprise to embrace this technology with minimal effort.
    • Cloud storage can start small and scale-up as needed. Organizations are no longer over-building to address the potential for rapid growth. Instead the drive is to put in place an architecture that is extremely flexible and that can scale on demand using commodity hardware and standard client access.
    • Clouds are designed to be self-managing and don’t require heavy IT manpower. Storage tiering, provisioning, and data movement are
    • time consuming tasks that are automated in cloud storage.
    • Storage clouds can be tuned for specific uses or applications. For example, clouds can be tuned for archival very cost-effectively, or
    • for streaming media performance.
  • Internal Cloud Computing Option Avoids Outsourcing Concerns


    Data center software provider, Cassatt Corporation, has announced new service and technology offerings to help companies safely realize "internal cloud computing".

    Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp, said this was an IT approach that delivers the benefits of cloud computing using the resources that organizations already have inside their data centers.

    He said cloud computing offers great promise by having third parties deliver the computing resources needed to run applications as an on-demand service, with a lot of the IT infrastructure invisible to the user.

    "However, at this point most IT professionals are not comfortable outsourcing Relevant Products/Services the mission-critical parts of their sensitive internal applications to an external cloud provider," he said.

    "They are concerned about availability, vendor lock-in, not having the control they need, and having to rebuild these applications from scratch with proprietary tools running on provider-specific platforms."

    To directly address these problems, the updated Cassatt offerings help customers implement cloud-style computing environments using their existing systems, inside the firewalls of their data centers without having to modify their current hardware or software.

    Coleman said the resulting "internal cloud" can provide the same operational efficiency, fault tolerance, and energy Relevant Products/Services savings promised by external clouds, but without the worries over security Relevant Products/Services, compliance, lack of control, or the need or delay required to change or replace their current applications.