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.
]]>My guess is, that clouds will have their final breakthrough when we’ll have more applications that exploit the new possibilities the cloud computing paradigm offers. More stuff like Google and Amazon. Or even smaller but innovative like Gigaspaces.
]]>‘. 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
]]>While Software-as-a-Service
covers the application part, cloud computing is more about the hardware topics covering cpu, storage and network. I see both as the two extremes with several other buzzy things in between like Platform-as-a-Service
, Mash-Ups and Next-Generation-Hosting. The baseline seems to be quite clear and the multitude of offerings is immense. So no one needs to question Gartner top ten predictions for IT organization <LINK> earlier this year. One question from my side is: Isn’t this a little bit too conservative? Is this only true for IT-organizations? Doesn’t other industries have margin pressure as well?
Especially predictions No 4
By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license.[...]
and No 5
By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service.[...]
are really compelling – just image the market size we are talking about….
Just to give you some brainfood: Salesforce meets GoogleApps
Roland
]]>‘IBM today unveiled Blue Cloud, a utility computing initiative designed to help customers run efficient grid-based platforms in enterprise data centers.’
This is the introductionary phrase of a datacenterknowledge.com article <READIT> from last year about IBMs ‘Blue cloud’ press release. Grid, Utility and Clouds plus datacenters in one sentence is quite a challange today, where new players and commenters are popping every day. In Dells cloud blog, Jimmy Pike tries to give a definition on these three important 2008 buzzwords <READIT>. After first beeing sceptic about the definitions, I partly changed my mind. I’d put more emphasis on “Utility computing” beeing not only an idea, but more kind of marketing buzz. And I wouldn’t call clouds beeing a subset of grids.
So what is the point? How are grids and clouds working together?
Does a cloud have to be a grid
?
like John Willis asks <HERE>. The answers is definitely no
.
As far as my research goes at this point, gr
ids
are more focussing on the hardware, the platforms, the interoperatbility between some or many or vaste number of systemes to provide ‘Internet scale’ computing power. The term ‘grid’ is describing more or less an architectural pattern.
Clouds
are more focussing on the delivery of computing services. It’s about APIs, payments and so on. Clouds are can
be based on computing grids, but can also have a different system architecture like seti@HOME (p2p clouds).
IBMs press kit <SEEHERE> for the Blue cloud press release adds some more interesting points about to the discussion
IBM today unveiled plans around cloud computing, a revolutionary approach to computing that will allow corporate data centers to act with the efficiency of the Internet. IBM’s commitment to cloud computing echoes another major commitment to computing the company made in 2000 when it announced its support of Linux.
So here we learn from IBM: Clouds are about ‘internet’, ‘data centers’ and ‘computing’, which sounds like defining a new computing paradigm:
From Host
over Client Server to Web based and cloud
I’ll come back to point, I promise.
Roland
]]>