As if I knew it, it put the tag ‘rumors’ to my post from the Oct. the 23rd. Now I learned from from Glenn O’Donnell’s Forrester blog for Infrastructure and Operation professionals that this rumor did not become true, yet. From my point of view this would have been a great fit, because it MIcrosoft is gaining ground in the IT Management field and Opalis would be a perfect addition to SCOM. So we have to keep calm, and see what will happen. Maybe some time from now, we will know what was behind this rumor.

Read Glenn O’ Donnels blog for more information <LINK>.

Just as a bunch of customers and partner are enjoying the great EMCWorld show in Orlando, AT&T announces a new Cloud Storage offering, based on their round about 40 datacenters worldwide and the freshly announced EMC Atmos internal to external Federation

functionality. The service named Synaptic <LINK> is available for selected customers and will probably reach general availability later this year. In the coming month there might by other offerings based on the so called EMC Atmos Online solution <LINK> which is currently in beta phase and strives to extent the existing Atmos functionality towards the clouds.

While mother EMC takes storage to cloud, the daughter VMWare also is attacking the marking with is Cloud Operating Systems, which opens their worlds most famous Virtualization plattform to cloud providers. VSphere will allow to move virtualized systems and services from a private cloud to public cloud offerings provided by roughly 500 worldwide VMWare cloud service providers <LINK>.

Welcome to the cloud club.

Google is buying land – obviously to build datacenters. E. g. 1000 acres in Iowa <LINK> and 800 acres in Oklahoma <LINK>. How many square-feet are the data-centers supposed have? What’s your guess? I’m sure that they don’t need these sites to just install racks and some modern cooling facility.

These chunks of land would be enought to build a Google theme park or – to be more on topic – addressing the issue of rising power costs, to install a nuclear power station. This would provide kind of clean energy, but would not be very sexy, looking a the high risks implied.

So the only purpose for these sites with big green Google will be to build modern high efficient datacenters and also highly modern power plants utilizing renewable energy. Google already invests in companies developing such technologies, as you can read on Googles Website in an article titled “powering a clean enery revolution” <HERE>.

Now we will be able to understand the meaning of “grid computing”.

What do you think?

A very interesting company these days seems to be Elastra <HOMEPAGE>. They are evangelists of a new approach to so called ‘Elastic Computing’ which might be the ‘next generation in IT infrastructure

‘. What in the beginning seems to be a very ambitious idea, is well presented and well documented and seems to make sense in many respects. My understanding after a first look is, that they basically of tool set, called the ‘Elastra Cloud Server On Demand

‘ sitting on top of a generic cloud provider like e.g. Amazon EC2. Utilizing the ‘Elastic Computing Markup Language

‘ (ECML) and the ‘Elastic Deployment Markup Language‘ (EDML) to have a structured description of cloud environments they want to revolutionize design, deployment, management and especially the automation of cloud computing solutions, including new pricing models and much more.

If one wants to dig into details, navigate to their smoothly designed products page <HERE> and have a look in the Whitepapers to learn something about clouds and their constraints. Or read this Grid Today article <HERE>.

I will watch them closely.

Roland